Tonight's poem

[marinarusalka]

You know, wit and satire and smut and clever sarcasm are all very well, but sometimes I just fall in love with a poem because the words are so damned pretty.

Comments

[prillalar]

This is one of my fave bits of Hopkins. I did a whole course on him one year at uni. Such a treat. His poems just fill the mouth.

[marinarusalka]

Oh, yeah. It's the rhythm of his words, and that crazy sprung rhyme scheme. I can't ever read this poem without having the urge to speak it aloud.

[rj_anderson]

I am not really much of a poetry reader on the whole, but I adore Hopkins. "The Windhover" alone would have made me his raving drooling fangirl for life, but then he had to go write "God's Grandeur" and this one as well. Sigh.

[marinarusalka]

I know what you mean. As with Kipling, I found it really hard to pick out just one favorite poem by him.

[threeoranges]

I didn't "get" Hopkins until that line in HINDHOVER:

And blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion

Beauty in a nearly-spent ember falling from the fire. What brilliance.

Would you hate me if I said that PIED BEAUTY seemed to me like a wilfully eccentric version of the hymn "All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small..."?

[marinarusalka]

Would you hate me if I said that PIED BEAUTY seemed to me like a wilfully eccentric version of the hymn "All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small..."?

Not at all. They are basically expressing the same sentiment, aren't they? (Though I have no clue which was written first.) But in poetry, more than in other kind of writing, it's not what you say, it's how you say it. :-)

[girasole]

Pied Beauty is one of my favorite poems in the whole world. And I love Hopkins. He has such care of the deepest recesses of language.