"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Friday, October 31, 2014

Poem: For the Lost Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2012)


A poem about poetry - doesn't that sound fun?  Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems are like none I've ever read before.  They're extraordinary, and far too many of them are gone. 

*          *          *
 
For the Lost Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
 
 
 
Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Feeling the spur of the Catholic call,
Gave poetry up for lent.
 
He thought this would purge him
Of sinful pride,
Not seeing that God’s glory
Soaked through every line,
And in 1868,
He set fire to his early work.
 
Paper and ink
Made fair fodder for the flames,
But more than paper and ink
Went up.
 
In that bonfire,
Over seven years’ worth
Of his soul,
Startlingly reshaped into meter and rhyme,
Scattered into ashes.
 
It would be another seven years
Before he would set his soul to paper again
And weave it into silken stanzas
Of kingfishers and kestrels,
Shipwrecks, and endless hours
Waiting for daybreak.
 
But in 1868,
Far too many phrases
Charred black and crumbled,
Swallowed by an incendiary appetite
Greedy for assonance and sprung rhythm.
 
Of those early pieces,
Only sainted fragments remain,
Safely harbored in the margins
Of neglected notebooks
Or preserved in the folds of letters
To friends who understood what they held.
 
These rescued words
Are just bits of shining scraps –
Half-poems with no end or beginning,
As if their pages were caught by the wind
And carried from the blaze
Only after their edges started to singe;
Or lonely single lines
That float like smoke-wisps
Out of context,
Their rhymes long smoldered away.


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