The terrible sonnets are amazingly good.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

https://www.thesewaneereview.com/articles/robert-lowell-colloquy-in-black-rock

The last stanza (in a slightly revised version from Lowell’s second book, “Lord Weary’s Castle”):

Christ walks on the black water. In Black Mud
Darts the kingfisher. On Corpus Christi, heart,
Over the drum-beat of St. Stephen’s choir
I hear him, Stupor Mundi, and the mud
Flies from his hunching wings and beak–my heart,
The blue kingfisher dives on you in fire.

Black Rock is a neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Not far from you, PA+Cat.

I wish I could use color. Punctuation alone doesn’t do the job. But I tried. Look at the K sounds in kingfisher, and then look at the I sounds. And then the DRs and the FLs and the As in the dragonflies. It may seem like a lot of pedantic nonsense, and possibly it is, except I don’t think so. I think all those echoes in the sounds, and also in how the words look on the page, set up a resonance that we feel as we read or listen, whether or not we register it on the surface.

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Maybe it’s because of Hopkins’ stature as a poet– I was surprised to find out that he stood only 5′ 2″– short even for the Victorian period. I was not surprised, though, to find that he died in his mid-forties of typhoid fever, just like Prince Albert, Victoria’s husband. Public health still had a long way to go in the late nineteenth century.

Rev. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

Them Jesuits, always conspiring 🙂 Creighton is a Jesuit school, as you probably know but others reading this may not.

I was for a long time puzzled by the kingfisher’s role in that poem, as the one I know is pretty ordinary in appearance. I think it’s the belted kingfisher. He does catch your eye by his very abrupt darting and a flash of white, but certainly nothing close to what Hopkins apparently saw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belted_kingfisher

I was also, like a lot of people, puzzled by “buckle!” in “The Windhover.” I’ve seen a fairly detailed explication of it but don’t remember now. You can assume that Hopkins had something very definite in mind. At first glance one might think his images are impressionistic but they’re the opposite. His notebooks are full of long excruciatingly detailed and precise descriptions of things like clouds.

In a far-away northern county in the placid pastoral region,
Lives my farmer friend, the theme of my recitative, a famous
tamer of oxen,
There they bring him the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds to
break them,
He will take the wildest steer in the world and break him and
tame him,
He will go fearless without any whip where the young bullock
chafes up and down the yard,
The bullock’s head tosses restless high in the air with raging eyes,
Yet see you! how soon his rage subsides—how soon this tamer
tames him;
See you! on the farms hereabout a hundred oxen young and old,
and he is the man who has tamed them,
They all know him, all are affectionate to him;
See you! some are such beautiful animals, so lofty looking;
Some are buff-color’d, some mottled, one has a white line running
along his back, some are brindled,
Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign)—see you! the
bright hides,
See, the two with stars on their foreheads—see, the round bodies
and broad backs,
How straight and square they stand on their legs—what fine
sagacious eyes!
How they watch their tamer—they wish him near them—how
they turn to look after him!
What yearning expression! how uneasy they are when he moves
away from them;
Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them, (books, politics,
poems, depart—all else departs,)
I confess I envy only his fascination—my silent, illiterate friend,
Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,
In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.