What lies beneath

So ... that last post got me to thinking about my junior poet project again, and more generally about poetry.

I did Donne. Done did it. Because my friend Patrick already had picked Hopkins, and David Oliver Davies advised me that if I could grasp the 17th c. metaphysical poets, I could grasp just about anything.

But ... since, I find that I never read John Donne for fun. Or inspiration. Gerard Manley Hopkins, yes.

Consider:

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
(from "The Sun Rising)

There is a sort of exuberence in Donne's language, and certainly in his "conceits" -- the images and ideas that stand for something other than their objective meanings -- and in some seasons I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him in bemoaning the day's meddling interruption.

Donne's not so bad, really.

But think now on this, Manley's recounting of a hawk on the hunt:

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!
(from "The Windhoever")

The music of his verse, its rhythm and alliteration, cries to be spoken -- sung -- aloud.

Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who suffered nearly his entire life from depression, struggled mightily with his faith, with the bleakness he found in his own mind and soul.

But somehow, it appears, he never gave up.

He frequently -- in poems like "Pied Beauty" and "Spring" and, especially it seems to me, in "As kingfishers catch fire ..." -- uses what he sees in nature to illuminate what, as he saw it, lies beneath.

Invariably, for Hopkins, that is the order of God's universe; the ingeniusness of His design; and the notion that everything signifies something.

Do I believe this?

I don't know. I would like to, I suppose. I keep thinking about it. But I'm still not sure.

I'll leave you with "As kingfishers draw fire," my favorite Hopkins poem for its music, and for -- in the end -- its powerfully humanizing argument that every man and woman is imbued with the same worth and dignity.

Read this aloud:

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.