Hopkins
- Thread starter Corpsey
- Start date
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We sat down. He did not ask me why I was in Laos. He told me. They all knew I was CIA. I wasn’t ready for this, I was probably a little high - enough to want to argue. Of course it didn’t do any good, but that only made me more stubborn. So I finally said to him that if he was a doctor, he’d had a university education; and since he spoke English so well, perhaps he’d studied English literature? He nodded. “Well then, try me. I told you I’m a writer. Ask me about writers you like. Maybe that’ll convince you.”
He was swaying gently back and forth, and his eyes were brightening. He was about to blow me to smithereens. He said there was only one English writer he really loved. So? A poet. And? A pause before the clincher: “Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
I enjoyed a pause of my own and then whispered:
“My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled . . .”
and on to the end of “Binsey Poplars”; then “The world is charged with the grandeur of God . . .,” and after that (I was pulling up verses I hadn’t even memorized) “The Windhover.”
The doctor readily acknowledged defeat. In fact he was delighted. He nodded his head in time to my recitations and corrected me once or twice: “‘Oh, morning at the cold brink eastward. . .'" - “ I believe the brink is brown.” We spent another twenty minutes discussing “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Finally he excused himself.
“Harry, Harry, how can I ever thank you? But now I must go to bed. It has been a joy to meet you.”
“My pleasure!”
“It is wonderful to find someone to talk to about Hopkins.”
“But you know so much more about him . . .”
“No - and another thing I must tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“How glad I am that CIA is training its men so well.”