Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
- The Kings of Missoula
- And the Great
- Inspiration
- Taboo against the Word Beauty, Ornithological Version on Aesthetic Theory
- Bearded Barley
- The Bowerbirds
- The Small Bang
- Dappled Things
- Fire
- Landscape
- Spare
- The Language of Pastoral
- At Buck Hall
- Pied Beauty
- A Dream of Hopkins
- A Simple Garden Ladder
- The Sleep
- Ghazal for My Selves, as Samson & Delilah
- Aubade for One Still Uncertain of Being Born
- Curtal Sonnet (with an Admonition)
- Confession to Hopkins
- Come to Me
- Hopkins in Kildare
- August Green: A Baptism
- Birds at Dawn
- The Acolyte
- To a Young Poet Resisting Hopkins
- Arrhythmia
- Goldengrove
- Date
- All Fall Long
- Strife
- The Bounds of Belief
- The Mind and Soul Growing Wide Withal
- The Horse on Zennor Hill
- The Tao of Alphabet
- Winter Mother
- My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Us Gerard Manley Hopkins
- A.M.: Her Lone Spark Dying
- Ascension
- That Necessary Evil
- The End of the Happy Hours
- One Wet Wednesday Afternoon
- By Eye-slit
- Come on the Cold
- No Fire
- Would Come Back
- River, Dissolution
- from Four Common Prayers
- Pater Noster
- Spring Again
- A Psalm of Ascents
- Poinsett's Bridge
- Reverdie
- The Telegraph Baby
- Red Kites at Tregaron
- Ark
- Saint's finger, Hill of Slane
- In the absence of a contract
- Ten Penny
- Red Bird, Black Sky
- The Tabernacle of Love
- Instructions to an Artisan
- Prayer
- The Christ-Frost
- Horse Apocalypse
- Migration Theory
- Never-Ending Birds
- Hopkins in Ireland
- Epitaph for the Journey
- Parable of the Red-Tailed Hawks
- Scoop
- What to Tell the Girl
- Finding Home by Taste, by Fire
- Winter Solstice
- Compline
- Elegy for D.S.
- Praise Song for Nikky Finney
- Coastland
- Breath and Bread
- I Waked and Fell
- Maple Gall
- Algae
- Aspen Song
- Left Behind
- Hawk in the Bronx
- The Canary
- Christ Imagined as Cavalry Commander
- October Trees
- Prayer to the Birds
- Dylan Thomas
- The Corpse Bird
- Speckled Trout
- Fall Creek
- Fossil Hunting at the Quarry
- Equinoctial
- A Question of Ear
- The Mercy Seat
- Savior
- Ornithology 101
- Oystermen
- Prayer with Fur
- Prayer with Game
- Collateral Damage
- These Fatals
- Elemental
- Via Negativa
- In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
- Knocking or Nothing
- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
- A Local Landfill's Invitation to Trash Left on the Moon
- Oil
- Ego
- Perspective
- Spouse
- Saw
- Breeze-Born
- Margaret's Reply
- Sea Journal
- The Baker Falls for Hopkins
- A Sestina for Mishima
- Ποιητική
- Meditation on the Hands of a Boy Miner
- The Acolyte
- Boy with Kite
- Jesuit Graves
- There Is a Balm in Gilead
- Michelle in Rain
- A Path through Walnut Trees after Rain
- Aubade for Yellow Jacket
- Afterword
- Contributors
Afterword
from The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
- The Kings of Missoula
- And the Great
- Inspiration
- Taboo against the Word Beauty, Ornithological Version on Aesthetic Theory
- Bearded Barley
- The Bowerbirds
- The Small Bang
- Dappled Things
- Fire
- Landscape
- Spare
- The Language of Pastoral
- At Buck Hall
- Pied Beauty
- A Dream of Hopkins
- A Simple Garden Ladder
- The Sleep
- Ghazal for My Selves, as Samson & Delilah
- Aubade for One Still Uncertain of Being Born
- Curtal Sonnet (with an Admonition)
- Confession to Hopkins
- Come to Me
- Hopkins in Kildare
- August Green: A Baptism
- Birds at Dawn
- The Acolyte
- To a Young Poet Resisting Hopkins
- Arrhythmia
- Goldengrove
- Date
- All Fall Long
- Strife
- The Bounds of Belief
- The Mind and Soul Growing Wide Withal
- The Horse on Zennor Hill
- The Tao of Alphabet
- Winter Mother
- My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Us Gerard Manley Hopkins
- A.M.: Her Lone Spark Dying
- Ascension
- That Necessary Evil
- The End of the Happy Hours
- One Wet Wednesday Afternoon
- By Eye-slit
- Come on the Cold
- No Fire
- Would Come Back
- River, Dissolution
- from Four Common Prayers
- Pater Noster
- Spring Again
- A Psalm of Ascents
- Poinsett's Bridge
- Reverdie
- The Telegraph Baby
- Red Kites at Tregaron
- Ark
- Saint's finger, Hill of Slane
- In the absence of a contract
- Ten Penny
- Red Bird, Black Sky
- The Tabernacle of Love
- Instructions to an Artisan
- Prayer
- The Christ-Frost
- Horse Apocalypse
- Migration Theory
- Never-Ending Birds
- Hopkins in Ireland
- Epitaph for the Journey
- Parable of the Red-Tailed Hawks
- Scoop
- What to Tell the Girl
- Finding Home by Taste, by Fire
- Winter Solstice
- Compline
- Elegy for D.S.
- Praise Song for Nikky Finney
- Coastland
- Breath and Bread
- I Waked and Fell
- Maple Gall
- Algae
- Aspen Song
- Left Behind
- Hawk in the Bronx
- The Canary
- Christ Imagined as Cavalry Commander
- October Trees
- Prayer to the Birds
- Dylan Thomas
- The Corpse Bird
- Speckled Trout
- Fall Creek
- Fossil Hunting at the Quarry
- Equinoctial
- A Question of Ear
- The Mercy Seat
- Savior
- Ornithology 101
- Oystermen
- Prayer with Fur
- Prayer with Game
- Collateral Damage
- These Fatals
- Elemental
- Via Negativa
- In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
- Knocking or Nothing
- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
- A Local Landfill's Invitation to Trash Left on the Moon
- Oil
- Ego
- Perspective
- Spouse
- Saw
- Breeze-Born
- Margaret's Reply
- Sea Journal
- The Baker Falls for Hopkins
- A Sestina for Mishima
- Ποιητική
- Meditation on the Hands of a Boy Miner
- The Acolyte
- Boy with Kite
- Jesuit Graves
- There Is a Balm in Gilead
- Michelle in Rain
- A Path through Walnut Trees after Rain
- Aubade for Yellow Jacket
- Afterword
- Contributors
Summary
Gerard Manley Hopkins's influence on English poetry since the publication in 1918 of his poems by his friend and fellow poet, Robert Bridges, has been nothing short of extraordinary. Thinking of the many poets who have responded to his work, one would have to name T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, David Jones, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, William Everson (Brother Antoninus), Charles Wright, and Seamus Heaney. His influence also extends beyond the English-speaking world, his work having been translated into French, German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Czech, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Every poet who has been influenced by Hopkins has, of necessity, focused on one or more aspects of Hopkins's work, fascinated, inspired, and often challenged by his word-chiming, complex epithets, or the way he mimics the action or what he called “the doing-be” of a particular thing, whether that be the wimpled wing of a kestrel or a stone falling into a roundy well, or the interiority of dizzying darkness likened to hanging from a cliff side in a storm.
There are so many aspects to Hopkins's poetry, each of them drawn by the logocentricity of his understanding of reality, which is that, as with the Big Bang theory of things, all creation came into Being in an instant of time—not in tick-tock time, but rather in kairotic time, in a flash, full—and moves out through the eons, only to return, finally, to its mysterious source, not as debris but as an imploding mosaic reassembled piece by piece into one: the Word made flesh made Word.
In mythic terms, that is what is at the heart of Hopkins's understanding of the Word and the plenitude of words, diamond dust, if you will, ignited by the fire that breaks forth from the Creator. And—synesthetically—by the sounds, the music Hopkins heard in the Welsh language, drawn as he was by its dappled cynghanedd, its word chiming, the play on the stops of consonants and vowels, lovely and yet strange, as if we were in a country where music was spoken, and which our hearts understood instantly, without translation, so that we found ourselves drawn to it as well.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The World is ChargedPoetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins, pp. 147 - 150Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016