The Room Was Suddenly Rich

The world's beauty and wonder, its mystery and diversity . . . Let's not forget.

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses. 

LOUIS MACNEICE

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 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:
                                Praise him.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Deliriously Living Moments Of Blue

Rural scene, a rural scene, / Sweet especial rural scene. GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS Binsey Poplars

Under a broad sky, / In the peaceful light / Of a spring day, / Why so restlessly / Do blossoms scatter down? KI NO TOMONORI (c. 850-c. 904)

How is it, / The restless spirit / Of scattering blossoms / Itself reveals / The peaceful colour of spring? FUJIWARA NO TEIKA (1162-1241)

A Bird, Just A Bird

'What fragrance', the bird said, 'what sunlight, oh Spring's come
and I'll go find my mate.'

Off the porch sill flew
the bird, flitting like some messenger, and was gone

A little bird
a thoughtless bird
a bird who never reads the news
a bird free from debt
a bird unacquainted with us

The bird flew through the air
above the red lights
unaware in the heights
and deliriously living
moments of blue

The bird was, oh, just a bird

FORUGH FARROKHZAD (1935-67); translated from the Persian

I'm taking a blogging break but will resume in June. I wish all my blog readers out there a wonderful Maytime. Happy walking, happy living, happy blogging! And remember to live deliriously those moments of blue...

A Camino Sonnet

It's too late now. There is no turning back.
I am no saint. But sinner's near the mark,
Counting my errors on this endless track,
Counting my failures in this endless dark.
The world is too much with us, someone said,
Nasty, brutish and short, it's been portrayed,
A daily grind to earn our daily bread,
A pitiable, heartless, sad parade.
Surely there's something more than grief and strife?
Some gleam of grace, some glimmer of shook foil,
Some chink of light, a glimpse of some bright life,
Before we shuffle off this mortal coil?
There's no success like failure. Through the hail
And rain I quest, the better for to fail.

The italicized quotes in my sonnet come from William Wordsworth, Thomas Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan respectively. The last line refers to Samuel Beckett's famous remark: Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Though at first glance this sonnet may seem despairing, it's really about searching and questing; and I think there's some redemptive hope in the last two lines.

(Posted from Puebla de Sanabria, on the Camino Sanabrés, Spain.)

The Rhythm Of Spring

Since we're all looking forward so much to springtime, I really must quote one more sonnet by Hopkins.

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring -
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look like 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.

Hopkins wrote in a kind of free verse he called 'sprung rhythm' - in which the 1st syllable of a foot is stressed, followed by any number of unstressed syllables. He claimed to have discovered this natural rhythm, the rhythm of natural speech, in English folk songs, oral poetry, Shakespeare and Milton.

This may seem rather surprising when we read the handful of dazzling sonnets he composed - for the brilliant linguistic artifice he creates seems at first a million miles from the organic nature and cadences of natural speech. Yet, if we concentrate on the rhythm only, rather than just being seduced by the poetic devices (of alliteration, onomatopoeia, repetition, assonance, rhyme etc) he employs to scorching effect, I think we can hear what he means ...

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844-89)

The Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had a tragically short life. He died of typhoid at the age of 45. Amongst other verse and prose he wrote some of the finest sonnets ever written in the English language. This - God's Grandeur - is one of them.

The photos were taken in the Romanesque Chapelle de Guirande which lies between Decazeville and Figeac on the Chemin de Saint-Jacques. The late 14th century murals are quite amazing.