Pied Beauty

Each Friday we provide the link to the blog that is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Julie Larios. You can visit her here at The Drift Record.



(Wild Boar Piglet, 1578, by Hans Hoffmann, circa 1530-
1591, German artist whose watercolors of animals are
sometimes mistaken for Albrecht Dürer’s work)

We conclude this month’s study of the sonnet with one of my favorites.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899) is an English poet of the Romantic tradition. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and John Clare, he looks not to man’s technological achievements but to Nature as the source of happiness and beauty, a mortal beauty that “keeps warm / Men’s wits to the things that are.”

The poem below is one of Hopkins’s variations on the Petrarchan sonnet, which he calls a “curtal” or restricted sonnet, made up of only ten and a half lines. With an “octave” of six lines of specific examples and a “sestet” of four and a half lines of descriptive adjectives, the sonnet explains Hopkins’s definition of beauty.

According to the Hopkins scholar Peter Milward, this is “essentially ‘pied beauty’ — beauty that is intricately interwoven with white and black, light and darkness, summer and winter, day and night, heaven and earth. Upon this fundamental contrast supervene the varied colors of the rainbow, even as the rising of the sun over the earth imparts to all things a dappled or mottled appearance and diversifies them in almost unlimited individuality.”

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-color 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 swíft, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Spring

(A Lilac Year, woodcut by Gustav Baumann, 1881-1971,
German-born American painter)

“Hopkins would never settle for being a dreamy little nature poet, a devotee of the pretty, and therefore a pretender of love. For how can you love weeds and thrush’s eggs and not love man? If God delights in the making of chestnuts, the more does he delight in making beings who can delight also in his making of chestnuts and everything else. Therefore, man, his labor and his ingenuity, must also be praised; for the quirky beauty of man’s own creativity, as evinced in sickles and ice-tongs and flails and adzes, reflects its source, the beauty of God.”

~ Anthony Esolen, from his book Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature

SPRING

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J. (1844-1899), British poet whose work has had a profound influence on modern poetry

The Times Are Nightfall

(Red, Orange, Tan and Purple, 1954 by Mark
Rothko, 1903-1970, American painter)

The poet begins with winter as a metaphor for the bleak and dark and cold of despair, but then reminds us of the powerful choice within us, to use our free will.

THE TIMES ARE NIGHTFALL

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one —
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.

Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal…

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844-1899), British poet whose work has had a profound influence on modern poetry

My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On

(Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris — flying
buttresses or masonry columns placed
on the outside to support and carry the
weight of the walls and roofs of Gothic
cathedrals)

Let me have more pity on my own heart, the poet writes, for I cannot go it alone.

MY OWN HEART LET ME MORE HAVE PITY ON

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies
Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.(1844-1899), British poet whose work has had a profound influence on modern poetry

Hurrahing in Harvest

(The Scythers, 1908 by N. C. Wyeth,
1882-1945, American artist and illustrator)

The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins are always best read out loud.

HURRAHING IN HARVEST

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift molded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Savior;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic — as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! —
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., 1844-1899, British poet whose work has had a profound influence on modern poetry

Queen of the May

(Madonna among the Strawberries by
an unknown German master, circa 1425)

Since medieval times, in many cultures, the month of May has been devoted to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

May is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season ─

Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honor?

asks the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring? ─
Growth in every thing ─

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathizing
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

~ from The May Magnificat by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.,
1844-1899, British poet whose work has had a profound influence on modern poetry

**********************************************************

“Queen of the May” is a hymn, most likely Irish, that traces its origins to the thirteenth century. There are several versions of the lyrics, including one written by Mary E. Walsh and first published in 1871. This hymn is often sung during the traditional May processions in the Catholic Church.

(The performance here is by the Irish tenor Frank Patterson,
1938-2000.)



QUEEN OF THE MAY

Bring flowers of the rarest,
Bring blossoms the fairest,
From garden and woodland and hillside and dale.
Our full hearts are swelling,
Our glad voices telling,
The praise of the loveliest flower of the vale.

Refrain:
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, and Queen of the May.
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, and Queen of the May.

Their lady they name thee,
Their mistress proclaim thee.
O grant that thy children on earth be as true;
As long as the bowers
Are radiant with flowers,
As long as the azure shall keep its bright hue.

Sing gaily in chorus,
The bright angels o’er us
Re-echo the strains we begin upon earth;
Their harps are repeating
The notes of our greeting,
For Mary herself is the cause of our mirth.

Spring

(Spring in Giverny by Claude Monet)

SPRING

Nothing is so beautiful as spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844-1899), British poet whose work has had a profound influence on modern poetry

The Shapes of Sound, part six

Gerard Manley Hopkins is one poet who mastered the shapes of sounds and colors of words, to borrow Dylan Thomas’s phrases. His poems are striking for their vibrant images and their original rhymes and rhythms.

Hopkins is also famous for his use of language. He preferred words with Old English and Germanic roots, rather than the vocabulary of Latin and Romance language roots that landed with the Norman Conquest. If he couldn’t find a particular Anglo-Saxon word, he would coin a new word by linking two unrelated words with a hyphen, even joining a noun with an adjective.

Listen to the poem below. The words are short, sweet and full of a rush of richness of images.

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-color 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.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844-1899), British priest and poet whose work had a profound influence on modern poetry