love in the wasteland

[timeripple]

I’m supposed to be writing a paper, so of course instead I’m doing laundry with the windows open and lying around reading and plotting non-school things to do over spring break and lusting after shoes.

So... here, have a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem I found in my class reading the other week.

The Windhover
To Christ our Lord

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: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

I wish I had Hopkins’ scansion marks. I love this, and "Spring and Fall," and his crazy sprung rhythm.

For poetry class we read a chapter by Ted Hughes on myth, meter and rhythm. Of course, nobody wanted to talk about Hughes because eww, technical. *eyeroll* He talks about "The Windhover" and just about every possible scansion for "As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding" and it's all kind of awesome.

Then he talks about trying to stick Anglo-Saxon words into Italian meter and how that’s weird and explains why nobody appreciated Andrew Marvell back in the day, and I love that I kind of get this. Of course it was the one reading that nobody wanted to talk about in class, and I didn’t want to say anything because oooh classics major snobby when the instructor doesn’t even want to talk about poetry from a technical perspective.

But it made me so happy to have Hughes talk about the reason scanning in English has been weird for me lately: English rhythm is based on emphasis, as far as I can tell, while the poetic forms those Italian meters go back to are based on syllable length. I can do Homeric dactylic hexameter in my sleep, but English? I keep looking for long syllables and finding them, but not metrically. Whoops? Heh.