Hopkins

[Corpsey]

Given Hopkins religious rapture Van Gogh might be a more apt (or equally useless) comparison.

 

[Corpsey]

"[Hopkins describes in his diary] the distant hill whose contour is like "a slow tune"."

I think next time I trip I'll spend some of the post peak descent reading Hopkins or thinking about inscape/instress.

The inscape of a blue rizla, for example.

 

[Corpsey]

I wonder how his theory of inscape applies to manufactured objects which are (more or less) identical copies of each other.

Does an action man have an inscape? If so, does its inscape derive from the original template, the achieved original which is derives from, or is its inscape it's individuality in spite of its relation to its thousands or millions of twins?

Given his emphasis upon producing original poetry that didn't simply replicate the forms and phrases other poets had come up with before him, perhaps he saw replications of forms as somehow anti-inscape. The "true" inscape occuring in nature, where no two blackbirds or conkers or grass blades are identical, be it in appearance, texture, movement or behaviour.

 

[Corpsey]

Does dissensus have an inscape? Or is it "merely" a bridge for all of our inscapes to meet on and instress each other?

 

[Corpsey]

"Note that the beaded oar, dripping, powders or sows the smooth with dry silver drops."

 

[Corpsey]

From Hopkins's journal, 1866

"For Lent. No puddings on Sundays. No tea except if to keep me awake and then without sugar. Meat only once a day. No verses in Passion week or on Fridays. No lunch or meat on Fridays. Not to sit in an armchair except can work no other way. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday bread and water.

*

‘Drops of rain hanging on rails etc. seen with only the lower rim lighted like nails (or fingers). Screws of brooks and twines. Soft chalky look with more shadowy middles of the globes of cloud on a night with a moon faint or concealed. Mealy clouds with a not brilliant moon. Blunt buds of the ash. Pencil buds of the beech. Lobes of the trees. Cups of the eyes. Gathering back the lightly hinged eyelids. Bows of the eyelids. Pencil of the eyelashes. Juices of the eyeball. Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves. Also of the bones sleeved in flesh. Juices of the sunrise. Joins and veins of the same. Vermillion look of the hand held against a candle with the darker parts as the middles of the fingers and especially the knuckles covered with ash."

 

[Corpsey]

Another entry

"Sun today. Swallows playing over Christ Church meadows with a wavy and hanging flight and shewing their white bellies. Snakes'-heads. Yellow wagtails. Almost think you can hear the lisp of the swallow's wings."

 

[Corpsey]

Now burn, new born to the world,
Doubled-naturèd name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.

 

[jenks]

Quoted him the other day, these lines embedded in my memory for 30+ years - ‘no worse there is none...pitched past pitch of grief’
Then went back and read the whole poem, it’s so well wrought.

 

[Corpsey]

I find some of his stuff hard work, hard to penetrate, or to connect to, or in dubious taste, but then read something like that stanza from wreck of the Deutschland...

I've been skimming John Updike's first novel this week and after reading some Hopkins I went back to it with a heightened awareness for alliteration and that made the Updike seem overcooked.