Tuesday already? What?
Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of my go-to poets, partially because of his use of "sprung rhythm" and his general playfulness with words. Partially it's also because I went to his church, St. Aloysius, when I studied at Oxford for a semester.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
And just because it's fun to hear it aloud:
Oh, "Pied Beauty." I remember that from when I first began to care about poetry, when I was a young teen. That was one of the first poems that stuck in my head.
ReplyDeleteSomehow, though, I always think of it as a spring/summer poem. I don't know why, there's nothing particularly seasonal about it.
Maybe just because fall is so much associated with
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Why yes, yes I am, although my heart has grown considerably older since I first read these poems. Ah well, it is the blight man was born for, and woman also, I suppose.
On a more cheerful note, it also reminds me of Louise Bogan's "Variations On a Sentence."
There are few or no bluish animals...
-Thoreau's Journals, 1885
Of white and tawny, black as ink,
Yellow, and undefined, and pink,
And piebald, there are droves, I think.
(Buff kine in herd, gray whales in pod,
Brown woodchucks, colored like the sod,
All creatures from the hand of God.)
And many of a hellish hue;
But for some reason hard to view,
Earth's bluish animals are few.
Huh. I think "Pied Beauty" is more of a fall poem for me. Winter is most closely associated with Frost's "Birches." And the changing of seasons is "Nothing Gold Can Stay."
ReplyDeleteI'll have to think about summer and spring.