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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