Hopkins

[Corpsey]

The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo | Gerard Manley Hopkins

(Maidens' song from St. Winefred's Well) The Leaden Echo How to keep--is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away? Ó is there

hopkinspoetry.com

35 mins 30 into this. I've been listening to this. Not sure it's the best performance but the poem mesmerised me.

 

[luka]

it's more fun to read than any other poetry

 

[Corpsey]

since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding
sheets tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there’s none; no no no there’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

 

[luka]

its shakespearean in the the catches, hesitations, tremors, flurries, gusts, runs, soaring, ascending and descending

 

[Corpsey]

• See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
• Is, hair of the head, numbered.
• Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
• Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind
• what while we slept,
• This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
• What while we, while we slumbered.
• O then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so
• haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged,
• so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,

 

[luka]

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

 

[Corpsey]

Stuff like "stirred for a bird" makes me grimace a bit

 

[luka]

yes but those lapses of taste are part of the substance of Hopkins

 

[Corpsey]

It's the penalty you pay for being so extravagant, extravagant enough to soar past the common atmosphere

 

[luka]

and another point of resemblance to Shakespeare

 

[Corpsey]

I suppose these points of poetic sinew stretching are sewn into Wordsworth but are too subtle for me to pick up on

 

[Corpsey]

Rhyme is such a risky thing for poets. Some of them are great at it but even Shakespeare seems to weaken a bit with those closing couplets he does.

 

[Corpsey]

The use of rhyme in the leaden/golden echo is brilliant though, subtle but unmissbale. Spread across these grand stanzas. Yeats is sometimes good at this sort of thing.

 

[yyaldrin]

never heard of this but it's beatiful, master of the alliteration?

 

[Corpsey]

I never have read Hopkins as an influence on Eliot but surely he must be? Four Quarters in particular with those refrains and the visionary religious aspect.

 

[luka]

never heard of this but it's beatiful, master of the alliteration?

yes theres nothing else like it. except Big Pun.

 

[Corpsey]

"As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend:"

 

[Corpsey]

"Wales clearly provided the occasion for his greatest experience of nature, as it had for Wordsworth (on Mt. Snowdon and near Tintern Abbey),John Dyer (on Grongar Hill), and Henry Vaughan."

@craner

 

[luka]

craner does like Hopkins. he's also the only poet Reynolds likes.

 

[luka]

i always say hes the second best poet from Stratford, after me.