Here's another song from my album "accidentals." It's inspired/adapted from a poem by my favorite Jesuit Priest-turned-poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The original poem is called Pied Beauty, and it goes like this:
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; 5
And áll trádes, 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: 10
Praise him.
And here's my song:
For Dappled Things, a song
Nine Poets for the Soul
Okay: not that I think most visitors to terra incognita are here because they've been dying to find out who my favorite poets of all time are, but the research I did before starting this blog told me that regular posting matters, and when at a loss, lists are always handy one-offs.
So, in keeping with terra incognita's interest in the connection between words and spirituality, I offer here the shortlist of my top nine favorite poets (I was going to make it the traditional ten: William Blake, Philip Larkin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti might all have contended for that tenth spot. But to be honest, none of them have hit me the way the following nine have, and if I were to have added one more to this list, it would only have been to make it reach a totally arbitrary quota. Who said you always have to have ten "top things" anyways?)
9. Leonard Cohen. for Annie, If it be Your will
8. W. B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium, Falling of the Leaves, Hosting of the Sidhe.
7. Walt Whitman. Song of Joys
6. D. H. Lawrence. Glorie de Dijon, Shadows, They Say the Sea is Loveless
5. John Keats Hyperion, Lamia.
4. C. S. Lewis. Dying in Battle, Modern Poetry, After Prayers Lie Cold
3. Dylan Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower, Light breaks where no sun shines
2. John Donne, La Corona, Resurrection imperfect, Divine Meditation 14
1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, I wake and feel the fell of dark, As kingfishers catch fire dragonflies draw flame, Gods Grandeur
In his spiritual autobiography, C. S. Lewis talks about the role that poetry played in his conversion. He says that as he approached the point of conversion, he discovered a "ludicrous contradiction between [his atheist/secular] theory of life and [his] actual experiences as a reader." Namely: "those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory [his] sympathy ought to have been ... all seemed a little thin. ... The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books"-- while the authors he felt he could feed on most deeply, and did-- George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, John Donne, Spenser, Milton, Herbert-- all "by a strange coincidence" shared the same unfortunate "kink": their Christian faith.
As he puts it: Christians were wrong-- but the rest were all bores.
At the time, he assumed these authors were good "in spite of" their faith; but as he reached the threshold of his own Aldersgate moment, he began to believe they were good "because of it." Only 3 of the poets on my list are explicitly Christian (Lewis himself, Donne and Hopkins), and many of the others are decidedly not (Thomas, Yeats, Cohen), but I think I get what he means about the best of Christian poetry expressing something of "the roughness and density of life" that secular verse can't get at. The operative word here, of course, is "best." There are times when perhaps Christian lit hasn't always been at its best, but then there have been times I've read a Divine Meditation of John Donne, and felt I had to hold myself perfectly still afterwards for fear the slightest movement might shatter the reverent word-spell he'd woven; and there are times I've read a G. M. Hopkins sonnet and felt like a tender fist had just crushed around my heart. And that too, I think, is a gift of God.
Happy Birthday Mr. Hopkins
Today is Gerard Manley Hopkins's birthday. I've written before about my deep appreciation for the poetry of this Jesuit priest: like a pint of Guinness for the soul, maybe.
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 áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
Práise hím.
Not that I feel I ever could, or should add anything to that, but I while ago I wrote a little ditty based on the themes of this poem. It's really not much, but in celebration of the 166th birthday of my favorite poet, I thought I'd share it here. It goes like this:
And while I'm at it, I thought I'd re-post a song I'd posted before based on another Hopkins poem: Windhover.
And while I'm still at it, here's a poem I wrote about 6 years ago or so, in response to his beautiful and arresting sonnet #45, "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."
Logos
Pierced hands and feet, pinned body driven down against the thought,
the bright stab of the shining logos touching to the very heart
and letting flow the mingled blood and water of my yearning.
Encompassing my brow within the twisted knot of thorny verse
to beat, break, bruise but balm my crown, let stream the wish,
your ringing, swinging phrase at once can flay and salve my flesh,
and lift against my lips a vinegar to slake and hone my thirst.
See! There! Look! Led by the heart, you've held me by the ear
brought to the root of the triumphant tree on gleaming wings.
Ah! There! In the bubble of my passion, in you passion, springs
as flotsam in the flowing fountain of His passion, pure
haloes, light, and streaming blood, doves, bells, stars and other holy things:
To praise the Word that that was the first, my broken word now sings.
Windhovering with Gerard Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins has this wonderful gem of a sonnet called "The Windhover." The first time I read it I thought: here's a poet after my own heart. The gist of it is the poet glimpses a falcon soaring off in the distance one morning, and sees in its beauty and freedom an analogy for Christ. That's the gist, but the poem is as much about the aural experience as the cerebral: read it with the ear.
The Windhover
for 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 reign 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: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-break embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Speaking of aural experiences, about two years ago I was plunking away at a chord progression on my guitar with "The Windhover" floating on the horizon of my mind. Here's the song that eventually emerged out of this musical conversation with Hopkins (click here to listen).
I wake and feel the fell of dark
Like espresso, maybe, or better, Guinness, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is certainly an acquired taste. I discovered his work while teaching high school English a number of years ago. I don't suppose my students ever really delved the depths of God's Grandeur or Windhover; but then, I'm not sure I have yet, either.
So one day I was looking for a few Hopkins poems to include on an English exam, of all things-- some lyrical fodder for a few half-hearted, adolescent poetry analysis essays-- when I stumbled innocently enough across this sonnet that stopped me dead in my utilitarian tracks.
Sonnet 45
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
I remember so clearly standing alone in my classroom, reading these lines over and over. And it felt like a fist had closed around my heart-- and crushed out beauty and ache and sadness and hope all mingled together. I couldn't escape the words. They, quite literally, brought me to my knees. A few days later I sat down and tried to write a poem in response to this brush with beauty.
Still thinking about the creative power of human speech to heal and transform, I offer it here:
Logos
O! to be pierced in the soul with words, their nails burning.
Pierced hands and feet, pinned body driven down against the thought,
the bright stab of the shining logos touching to the very heart
and letting flow the mingled blood and water of my yearning.
Encompassing my brow within the twisted knot of thorny verse
to beat, break, bruise but balm my crown, let stream the wish,
your ringing, swinging phrase at once can flay and salve my flesh,
and lift against my lips a vinegar to slake and hone my thirst.
See! There! Look! Led by the heart, you've held me by the ear
brought to the root of the triumphant tree on gleaming wings.
Ah! There! In the bubble of my passion, in you passion, springs
as flotsam in the flowing fountain of His passion, pure
haloes, light, and streaming blood, doves, bells, stars and other holy things:
To praise the Word that that was the first, my broken word now sings.