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My window shows the travelling clouds. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Recommend for any Hopkins lovers or students.
Hopkins' style is unique--a combination of Anglo-Saxon alliterative stress patterns, and a truly modern consciousness of spirituality and doubt. Although he draws heavily on Mediaeval techniques of versification, the poet's language escapes the flatline of the archaic through an energetic dynamism. The result is what he terms "sprung rhythm", wherein phonemes reach a level of excitement through rhythmic juxtaposition of stressed and unstressed syllables in an at times choppy, at times smooth pattern.
What I believe "Wreck of the Deutchland" is a masterpiece of Hopkins' language. This poem, like much of his work, is extraordinarily well suited to reading out loud. The ebb and flow of the paced alternation of syllabic and intoned stress gives the reader an intuitive feel for the thematic material of the poem. When the boat is tossed by rough waters, so tosses the reader's voice. When the narrator trembles with fear or faith, so trembles the reader's tongue. However, the sonic force of "Wreck of the Deutchland" is only one aspect of this multi-layered tapestry. The language of sound is a kind of precondition or foreshadowing of the meaning contained in the semantic and symbolic language of the text.
The thing perhaps that I love most about Hopkins is that he seems to incorporate all facets of expression in his work, but certainly not in a pedantic fashion. He is a metaphysical poet in the most honest and unassuming manner. The different textual layers arise and intermingle organically in the medium of the very accessibly, very human voice of a humble poet.
Hopkins did not write a great deal( Compare his spare output to the reams of Wordsworth) but he wrote a number of poems which are, in my judgment, among the greatest in the language. He did this by creating a distinctive diction, and rhythm of his own.
The sprung rhythm which he employed had its origin in his reading of Anglo- Saxon poetry, with its emphasis on scanning the strong stresses alone. The alliterative quality of his verse also has its origin in early Anglo- Saxon poetry.
But Hopkins infuses his work with an intensity of meaning, a richness so rare no ripeness could be greater.
Among the truly great poems in this collection my favorites are"," Thou Art Indeed Just Lord", " God's Grandeur" " and Felix Randal."
This is great great poetry, and among the greatest written about human suffering.
Emily Dickinson would have felt a chill down her spine at reading it. And for Kafka it would have most certainly broken up the icy- sea within.
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