Stuck for Words? Me, Too. Poet-Priest Hopkins to the Rescue

February 23, 2011

If you’re wrestling words today like I am–on deadline to write a song, maybe, or feeling crazed to get that story keyed out, or compelled to come up with something new and insightful to say to a classroom or congregation of faces–here’s help for you. And for me, too.

Meet–if you’re not already intimate friends– poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).

This was the Victorian era, of course, a time when conventional poetry kept to precise, predictable rhythms and rhymes (think of big, bush-bearded Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his galloping “Charge of the Light Brigade”:

Half a league, half a league,
  Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death....

Hopkins would have none of it.

Instead, he played with what’s known as “sprung rhythm,” which was both a throwback to early Anglo-Saxon poetry and also allowed for all kinds of new and original acoustic sensations.

And there’s what he does with imagery, too, taking two objects that seem to have nothing in common and comparing them, or grafting them into one word. Inscape, he called his way of examining all the complex characteristics that makes a thing unique, and seeing straight into its heart.

A person of passionate faith, Hopkins was no stranger to doubt or depression–suffered, in fact, from both. But if you’re like me, his poetry will leave you changed and re-charged. Will make you see a fallen leaf or a bird’s flight or a trout differently from now on. Will loosen your own seized-up frustration for words.

“The Windhover”

To Christ our Lord
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-vermillion.


Inventiveness, surprises in its patterning, sounds that mimic the sweep of the falcon, alliteration, vivid imagery… it’s all there.

May you write today–compose, teach, type and tell stories–with originality and passion.

And keep in touch

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Posted by Joy Jordan-Lake | Filed Under Becoming a Writer: We're all in This Together--By Ourselves, Story and the Search for Meaning, Writing in the Midst of Real Life 

Comments

Comments

  1. Beth J-J says:
    February 23, 2011 at 8:44 pm

    I love your posts on FB and your blog. It’s requiring so much of my brainpower to get through this last statistics class that I don’t have any brain cells available for creativity. But…I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel – so maybe I can be more engaged before too long. I’m so glad you’re doing this!

  2. Mary Ingmire says:
    February 23, 2011 at 11:49 pm

    What beautiful imagery! Timely as well. Today’s Franklin Review Appeal had an article about a pair of nesting eagles across Hwy 96 from Westhaven.

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