Hopkins

Corpsey

bandz ahoy


35 mins 30 into this. I've been listening to this. Not sure it's the best performance but the poem mesmerised me.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding
sheets tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there’s none; no no no there’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.
 

luka

Well-known member
its shakespearean in the the catches, hesitations, tremors, flurries, gusts, runs, soaring, ascending and descending
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
  • See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
  • Is, hair of the head, numbered.
  • Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
  • Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind
  • what while we slept,
  • This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
  • What while we, while we slumbered.
  • O then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so
  • haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged,
  • so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
 

luka

Well-known member
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 rein 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: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's the penalty you pay for being so extravagant, extravagant enough to soar past the common atmosphere
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I suppose these points of poetic sinew stretching are sewn into Wordsworth but are too subtle for me to pick up on
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Rhyme is such a risky thing for poets. Some of them are great at it but even Shakespeare seems to weaken a bit with those closing couplets he does.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The use of rhyme in the leaden/golden echo is brilliant though, subtle but unmissbale. Spread across these grand stanzas. Yeats is sometimes good at this sort of thing.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I never have read Hopkins as an influence on Eliot but surely he must be? Four Quarters in particular with those refrains and the visionary religious aspect.
 
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