Home » Sound and sense: “but I am now with you”

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Sound and sense: “but I am now with you” — 13 Comments

  1. I still have my copy, too! (of Sound and Sense). I still love that book, and there are a number of poems which to think of is to see on a page in S&S.

    I’m impressed that you were so taken with “Spring and Fall” at such an early age. I didn’t encounter Hopkins till freshman English in college, but I don’t think I would have gotten him at eleven or twelve. When I did get interested in him, I read him so much that his best work took its place among works of art that I’ve heard or read or seen so many times that I don’t need to hear or read or see them again. But I should go back to him now and try some of the poems that more or less evaded me in the past.

    I think “Pied Beauty” was one of the first to really grab me. That, and “Hurrahing in Harvest”. And I’m very partial to the dark sonnets, especially “No worst…” some lines of which come to me often (alas).

  2. I recall having to read, while in high school, Ode On a Grecian Urn and it put me off poetry. Oddly enough, years later while watching Tyrone Power’s Razor’s Edge it was his character’s reading of The Day Is Gone, And All Its Sweets Are Gone! also by Keats, that got me interested in poetry. It was the first time I’d bought a book of poetry, a collection of Keats.

    Since then, it’s been something of the experience of a political change story, in my case a gradual – from yuck, to not bad, to like it a lot. ‘Like it a lot’ started with Edna St Vincent Millay’s Recuerdo.

    My tastes tend toward the popular – don’t think I’m ready for Auden.

  3. “My love for poetry might seem an eccentric although harmless hobby . . . .”

    On the contrary, Neo, the arts speak to each us in different ways and we, each in turn react in different ways to each of the arts. Hardly an eccentric hobby, but rather a revelation of one’s own innate passion for life.

  4. I’ve always loved your blog for the clarity you bring to every post, and because you made the same political journey I did. But now I see a deeper reason — you love poetry and Hopkins especially. Whenever I find myself doubting the meaning of it all, I read Pied Beauty, and as I get closer to pushing up daisies, Felix Randall is much on my mind.

  5. Neo said, “This is not a poetry course.”
    Maybe not, but I learned something. Some poetry can be like foreign language to me. You have done a nice job of showing how to translate.

    I get some poetry. Robert Service and Max Ehrmann grabbed me at once. I guess I’m a tad lazy and don’t want to have to dig for gold.

  6. Listen, listen, just read it out loud and listen:
    The Windhover

    To Christ our Lord

    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, 5
    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 plé³d makes plough down sillion
    Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

  7. 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

    AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
    Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

    Now you’ve got me thinking of the Falcon 9. 😀

  8. Our relationship to poetry is our relationship to ourselves: we’re not sure whether it’s love or hate (excluding the self-approving).

    Mostly, we usually bully the issue.

    But we do venerate those who are sure; we Thank God! for them; and
    for that scrub from the outside.

  9. Neo,

    I think your comment that ‘poetry is something like music’ may explain my mixed response to poetry. At its best it is like great opera, in which the union of words and music is greater than either alone. I doubt if the words of Shakespeare or Robert Browning could be as moving for me in prose as they are in poetry.

    Unfortunately for me, in much poetry I either cannot hear the music or the music obscures the words and I just end up befuddled, appreciating neither.

    Perhaps it is similar to my limitation in appreciating painting. I am moved by much of the art of the 16th century but by little of what i am told is great art of the 20th century.

  10. For junior high English I had a traditional schoolmarm who gave extra credit for memorizing poetry, such as Longfellow’s “Ride of Paul Revere.” I didn’t take her up on the offer, though a half century later I still know several lines from “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” – a poem which we studied but were not required to memorize. I must have liked the poem for the words to stick in my mind so long. [In spite of myself, I still know some lines from “the Ride of Paul Revere.”]

    English teachers in high school and college killed my love for poetry. I did not like being forced into the “junior literary critic” mold.

    Many years later as a substitute teacher in a 5th grade class of “problem kids,” I saw how the teacher had used students reciting poetry to successfully engage them.

    After that experience in the classroom, while I never became a big poetry reader, I occasionally would SPEAK out while reading some poetry.

    For me, though, poetry is something like music–that is, it enters the mind and heart through a different and more emotional route than ordinary prose.

    It is the SPEAKING of poetry that makes it stand out. Just like song lyrics.

    I liked very much the rhythmS of the Hopkins poem. I like to speak in irregular rhythms myself. Some modern music also has irregular rhythm. Many interpretations of Chopin, a composer not so modern, also play him in irregular rhythms- which gives a jazzy feeling to a Romantic composer. I don’t know to what degree Chopin composed that way.Not so much a digression as what the Hopkins poem reminded me of.

  11. Neo, I hadn’t seen that poetry post before. Thanks for the link. Amazing how decades later something you had stored up in your brain from your school days, the Frost poem, popped up. When at an appropriate moment in your life you were ready to interpret something of a fact you had learned – the Frost poem- you did so.

    The text/interpretation, facts/analysis conflict has always been there in education. As I see it, one has to know the facts, know the text, before one can analyze or interpret. Which is why memorization has traditionally been stressed more for elementary school students than for college students. Elementary students neither have a knowledge base from which they can analyze very much, nor do they yet have the mental development to do much analysis or interpretation.

    One instance of my favoring analysis/interpretation over facts/memorizing was in my English Literature class in high school. Our exams on Shakespeare were divided approximately equally between details on the plays and essays. At the time, I wanted ALL the exams to be based on essays. The teacher’s reply was, “If you don’t know the facts, how can you argue them?”

    Some years later I took a Shakespeare class in college. I read every play twice – remembering what a fellow student in my high school English class had done to get an A.[She later became an MD.] Our classes were mostly discussions. Because I was more familiar with the details, I was able to contribute to the discussions. While the grades were based on essays, my greater knowledge of the details assisted me in the essays. For my efforts, I got the only semester A I had achieved in a high school or college English class. In addition, while English classes from high school on had been drudgery for me, I enjoyed this class.

    I guess my high school English teacher was correct in requiring that we know details. He did know his Shakespeare, as he got his Ph.D. in Shakespeare after I had graduated from high school.

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