gerard manley hopkins.

S: Pretty much everything.
D: Maybe the one about the nuns being shipwrecked.

hopkins is "as kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame"

and

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."

B's studied classicism, controlled artifice and archaic diction are huge barriers for the contemporary reader. But he was a brilliant technician and had a wonderful ear: for me his poetry has a much subtler and more satisfying beauty than H's. He was probably the last significant poet to believe that Romanticism was an aberration and that the Neoclassical tradition would reassert itself (although Byron believed something similar).

Three generations ago people found it easy to appreciate Raphael, difficult to appreciate Picasso. Now the situation is reversed. So with Bridges and Hopkins: one was easy, the other difficult; within a couple of generations they have swapped positions. Yet they were not born centuries apart: they were contemporaries and friends with a strong appreciation of one another's work.

Of course if you think Bridges is no more than a pretty versifier in an already dated style this is self-explanatory. Hopkins was an original, it took time for his innovations to be absorbed and it's no surprise that his contemporaries felt more comfortable with the more conventional but less talented Bridges. That would be the text-book version. I think if you worry at the surface of this something more interesting emerges about the way taste changes and new orthodoxies develop.

To take one of those sonnets:

While yet we wait for spring, and from the dry
And blackening east that so embitters March,
Well-housed must watch grey fields and meadows parch,
And driven dust and withering snowflake fly;
Already in glimpses of the tarnish'd sky
The sun is warm and beckons to the larch,
And where the covert hazels interarch
Their tassell'd twigs, fair beds of primrose lie.
Beneath the crisp and wintry carpet hid
A million buds but stay their blossoming;
And trustful birds have built their nests amid
The shuddering boughs, and only wait to sing
Till one soft shower from the south shall bid,
And hither tempt the pilgrim steps of spring.

This is a simple descriptive lyric, for example, largely conventional in sentiment and imagery. There isn't much for "practical criticism" to get a grip of(*). But it is sonically very beautiful. Not only is his musical ear very fine but he writes very clearly and the combination makes his poetry easy and enjoyable to read at length - (demonstrated in that he actually managed to become popular by writing a book length philosophical poem).

Do you like Dryden or Pope? If so I'm surprised that you don't at least slighly get Bridges.

(*) His liking for long, musical philosophical poems suggests an obvious influence from Shelley, a bete noir for Eliot, Leavis and the new criticism that was about to take hold. It isn't difficult to see why Bridges went so quickly out of fashion.

If a poem is tempting to use for music, then it most likely doesn't offer enough music of its own.

And I haven't much read Dryden, and haven't particularly liked what Pope I've read, more for his obnoxious personality, although I also haven't found much beauty in his words.

Perhaps what I was more interested in when I suggested the comparison with Bridges is that it brings out a change in the way people read poetry. People have learned what the characteristics of good poetry are meant to be and how to apply their analyses and make their judgements. A contemporary reader would have approached the poem very differently, although he would have understood prosody well enough to realise that Bridges was very innovative and technicallly superb.

The way we read poetry now works much better for Hopkins than Bridges. I'm just not convinced by the orthodox belief that this is entirely a good thing. People are much less likely to read poetry for pleasure now. The vast majority of people who learn to analyse poetry in the approved way as part of their academic studies stop reading poetry once they have their degrees. These facts may not be entirely unconnected. We murder to dissect.

Of course there are similarities as well as differences the most obvious being their obsession with how a poem should sound. But Hopkins was interested in reviving Anglo-Saxon traditions of alliteration etc while Bridges was experimenting within the more continuous neoclassical tradition. (Although he was radical enough to invent a completely new prosody based on syllables rather than accents). I like Hopkins very much but his reputation is based on a handful of much-anthologised pieces and his (possibly slightly serendipitous or illusory?) appearance as a progenitor of modernism. The Windhover and Pied Beauty are indeed wonderful and his originality was more radical than Bridges. But he doesn't make a very satisfying s&d because the good stuff is the obvious stuff and there isn't a huge amount of it. Although for me the Wreck of The Deutchland is an ambitious failure.

I'm not sure it's such a bad thing that people don't "read poetry for pleasure".

I Could Puke (in bad imitation of G.M. Hopkins, S.J.)

Gob-smacked, whacked, whirled earthward,
Down-driven me, 'neath knee dark dirt hard touched.
Crutch wanting to bear me up eye-high.
No more the bare bar before. I know naught but God's rebuke.
I could puke.

Ears ringing, singing banshee-like, off key.
I grope the foot rail, baleful blind worm I.
Sighing, some rat's taste my tongue's taste, aye.
Rising awkward as a prayer gummed or great whale's fluke;
I could puke.

Gone all slack, wracked, drooping hopelessly
Hard bit, smitten with draughts I quaffed; pub grub
Unbidden seeks release as I kneel, a reeking snot tub,
Rubber-legged, bent, penitent and wretched as a straitened duke,
I could puke.

But people did. Why should this being less of a mystery to me than it is to you make me stupid?

I think with poetry like that Bridges lyric (which I really like!) to see eg. 'soft showers' as "done to death" is almost to miss the point of it - I don't know much abt Victorian neoclassicism but in the Augustan nc stuff I've read, the sentiment seems closer to seeing eg soft showers as objectively good poetry, the _progression_ of poetry frm sophocles(ok)-> lucan(yeah) -> shakespeare(yeah!) -> Dryden(YEAH!) enabled by the discovery of such wotsits. To dismiss them as comforting but trite is fair, but it denies the thrill of the nearness of the future, of practice making (nearer) perfect?

(A thought abt the "Empsonian" modern Hopkinspoem vs the Bridges "watery lull" (um which may be rubbish, the thought) is that the latter is much more communal, the experience of reading it is one in which one to some extent knows what one will get before and confirmingly gets it (that last line's metrically certain theme of return), it can be written on the inside covers of gifted books, you can take a line from it out of context and quote it to impress people, all without the issue that arise w/ ambiguity that you don't get what they get. It's an 'us' poetry vs a 'me' poetry, maybekinda?)

Gravel's continuation of Frankie's line of thought makes me think that perhaps it wasn't other forms of entertainment or literature that did in the poem read for "pleasure", but rather the increasing ubiquity of advertising that did it in.

Awwwwwww, shucks.

If the handle weren't already slippery with blood, you could try giving it another twist. ;->

What's wierd is that the poem is so empty of everything else. It never comes together as human speech or articulate thought, but only as a heap of pretty, carved beads, strung together on so weak a thread that two seconds after hearing it you forget it again.

If you're like me, you'll find you cannot have a single thought in your head while that poem is running in your mind. It is just so many movements of the tongue, disguised as speech. It is a puff of breath designed to barely ruffle the complacent mind for a moment or two before dying away to stillness again.

question:

is there any rule of thumb for how to read / understand staggered left-margin justification like this:

wreck of the deutschland yo

?

In the Valley of the Elwy

I remember a house where all were good
To me, God knows, deserving no such thing:
Comforting smell breathed at very entering,
Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood.
That cordial air made those kind people a hood
All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing
Will, or mild nights the new morsels of spring:
Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should.

Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales;
Only the inmate does not correspond:
God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,
Complete thy creature dear O where it fails,
Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.

he's marvelous to read aloud

✓

i just read it aloud to tt, guessing where the sprung-rhythm accents would go