Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Hopkins was a priest who wrote poems that bounce. He made his lines spring and ring like bells, full of birds, storms, stars, and kingfishers caught mid-flight. Nobody would print his poems while he lived. He also wrote sad poems about feeling far from God, and he did not hide. Read his work out loud, slowly. It sounds like weather, and it feels honest.
Hopkins burned his early poems when he became a Jesuit in 1868 and wrote almost nothing for seven years. Then his superiors' world gave him Wales, Welsh verse rhythms, and the wreck of the Deutschland, a ship lost with five Franciscan nuns aboard, which broke his silence in 1875. He went on writing in obscurity, sending poems to his friend Robert Bridges, publishing nearly nothing, doubting his own gift, dying of typhoid in Dublin in 1889 at forty-four.
Bridges kept the manuscripts for almost thirty years and published them in 1918, convinced the world was finally ready. It was: modern poetry dates one of its springs from this book. In it you find the great nature sonnets (God's Grandeur, The Windhover, Pied Beauty), written in his invented sprung rhythm with words coined, compounded, and stressed to bursting, and the late 'terrible sonnets' of spiritual desolation, honest as any poetry in the language.
Our text preserves the edition's numbering and the Author's Preface, Hopkins's own notes toward explaining his rhythms, and drops Bridges's endnotes, which belong to scholars. Read the poems aloud; on the page they can look knotted, in the ear they fly.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who wrote poems so new in sound that nobody would publish them in his lifetime; they appeared in 1918, twenty-nine years after his death, and changed English poetry. His sprung rhythm makes lines bounce and ring, and his subjects are kingfishers, windhovers, harvests, and a faith that holds on through darkness. Read them aloud.
The first chapter
I BEAR a basket lined with grass;
I am so light, I am so fair,
That men must wonder as I pass
And at the basket that I bear,
Where in a newly-drawn green litter
Sweet flowers I carry,--sweets for bitter.
Lilies I shew you, lilies none,
None in Caesar's gardens blow,--
And a quince in hand,--not one
Is set upon your boughs below;
Not set, because their buds not spring;
Spring not, 'cause world is wintering.
But these were found in the East and South
Where Winter is the clime forgot.--
The dewdrop on the larkspur's mouth
O should it then be quenchèd not?
In starry water-meads they drew
These drops: which be they? stars or dew?
Had she a quince in hand? Yet gaze:
Rather it is the sizing moon.
Lo, linked heavens with milky ways!
That was her larkspur row.--So soon?
Sphered so fast, sweet soul?--We see
Nor fruit, nor flowers, nor Dorothy.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1918. Author died 1889. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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