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Hopkins’ kingfishers and dragonflies — 11 Comments

  1. It’s hard to choose just one favorite of Hopkins’ poems, but this is one that I love:

    The Windhover

    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.

  2. A favorite: Walt Whitman ~ The Ox-tamer

    In a far-away northern county in the placid pastoral region,
    Lives my farmer friend, the theme of my recitative, a famous
    tamer of oxen,
    There they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds to
    break them,
    He will take the wildest steer in the world and break him and
    tame him,
    He will go fearless without any whip where the young bullock
    chafes up and down the yard,
    The bullock’s head tosses restless high in the air with raging eyes,
    Yet see you! how soon his rage subsides—how soon this tamer
    tames him;
    See you! on the farms hereabout a hundred oxen young and old,
    and he is the man who has tamed them,
    They all know him, all are affectionate to him;
    See you! some are such beautiful animals, so lofty looking;
    Some are buff-color’d, some mottled, one has a white line running
    along his back, some are brindled,
    Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign)—see you! the
    bright hides,
    See, the two with stars on their foreheads—see, the round bodies
    and broad backs,
    How straight and square they stand on their legs—what fine
    sagacious eyes!
    How they watch their tamer—they wish him near them—how
    they turn to look after him!
    What yearning expression! how uneasy they are when he moves
    away from them;
    Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them, (books, politics,
    poems, depart—all else departs,)
    I confess I envy only his fascination—my silent, illiterate friend,
    Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,
    In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.

  3. Not surprisingly, Hopkins is very highly regarded by literary Catholics and other Christians. Also by poets and academics, with an influence on the former which is definitely not always for the best. His style is so over the top and distinctive that anything that shows a strong influence from him is pretty obviously imitative and almost inevitably not as good. He was a huge favorite among my literary set back in the ’60s. There are at least two Christian literary magazines that take their names from him, Dappled Things and The Windhover.

    I was for a long time puzzled by the kingfisher’s role in that poem, as the one I know is pretty ordinary in appearance. I think it’s the belted kingfisher. He does catch your eye by his very abrupt darting and a flash of white, but certainly nothing close to what Hopkins apparently saw.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belted_kingfisher

    I was also, like a lot of people, puzzled by “buckle!” in “The Windhover.” I’ve seen a fairly detailed explication of it but don’t remember now. You can assume that Hopkins had something very definite in mind. At first glance one might think his images are impressionistic but they’re the opposite. His notebooks are full of long excruciatingly detailed and precise descriptions of things like clouds.

  4. Rev. Daniel S. Hendrickson, SJ

    Rev. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

    Them Jesuits, always conspiring 🙂 Creighton is a Jesuit school, as you probably know but others reading this may not.

  5. One of my favorite Hopkins poems is “Spring and Fall,” which he inscribed “to a young child”:

    Márgarét, áre you gríeving
    Over Goldengrove unleaving?
    Leáves like the things of man, you
    With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
    Ah! ás the heart grows older
    It will come to such sights colder
    By and by, nor spare a sigh
    Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
    And yet you wíll weep and know why.
    Now no matter, child, the name:
    Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
    Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
    What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
    It ís the blight man was born for,
    It is Margaret you mourn for.

    Maybe it’s because of Hopkins’ stature as a poet– I was surprised to find out that he stood only 5′ 2″– short even for the Victorian period. I was not surprised, though, to find that he died in his mid-forties of typhoid fever, just like Prince Albert, Victoria’s husband. Public health still had a long way to go in the late nineteenth century.

  6. As [k] (i) ng [f] (i)shers [k]atch [f](i)re, [dr](a)gon[fl] ies [dr](a)w [fl] (a)me

    I wish I could use color. Punctuation alone doesn’t do the job. But I tried. Look at the K sounds in kingfisher, and then look at the I sounds. And then the DRs and the FLs and the As in the dragonflies. It may seem like a lot of pedantic nonsense, and possibly it is, except I don’t think so. I think all those echoes in the sounds, and also in how the words look on the page, set up a resonance that we feel as we read or listen, whether or not we register it on the surface.

  7. And I forgot to add — there is a 1953 novel entitled Kingfishers Catch Fire, by Rumer Godden, set in India and semi-autobiographical, like almost everything she wrote. Full of shimmering language something like that of the Hopkins poem.

  8. Robert Lowell’s answer to Hopkins’ kingfisher: “Colloquy in Black Rock”, first published in The Sewanee Review in 1944:

    https://www.thesewaneereview.com/articles/robert-lowell-colloquy-in-black-rock

    The last stanza (in a slightly revised version from Lowell’s second book, “Lord Weary’s Castle”):

    Christ walks on the black water. In Black Mud
    Darts the kingfisher. On Corpus Christi, heart,
    Over the drum-beat of St. Stephen’s choir
    I hear him, Stupor Mundi, and the mud
    Flies from his hunching wings and beak–my heart,
    The blue kingfisher dives on you in fire.

    Black Rock is a neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Not far from you, PA+Cat.

  9. Among his Terrible Sonnets, many consider his best to be;

    I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
    What hours, O what black hours we have spent
    This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
    And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
    With witness I speak this. But where I say
    Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
    Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
    To dearest him that lives alas! away.

    I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
    Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
    Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
    Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
    The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
    As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

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