A Year With Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ: Drawing Closer To The Heart Of The Lord: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty

Friday, April 13, 2012

Drawing Closer To The Heart Of The Lord: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty « Paying Attention To The Sky

Drawing Closer To The Heart Of The Lord: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty « Paying Attention To The Sky
Excerpt:
This is not the first time I have introduced this poem on Paying Attention To The Sky, but I shall do it again to showcase Anthony Esolen’s prodigious talents of interpretation. I first studied the poem back in a lit class in college and counted syllables and stress, marveling at the intricacies of structure and form of the sonnet. Elsewhere I have related how this poem can easily become a prayer — a cool summer morning following several days in the nineties — you can memorize this and recite it on the way to bus stop. You’ll be surprised how many more counter, original, spare, strange things you’ll notice on the way to work.
“God is Love”
WE ARE USED TO hearing the biblical verse, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and nodding knowingly to ourselves. “Ah yes,”...............

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Citings:

Unless otherwise specified, I will use the following:
Catherine Phillips (ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, Oxford’s World Classics, 2009
The Image Source:
Study of rocks and ferns in a wood at Crossmount, Perthsire, 1843
http://goldenagepaintings.blogspot.com/2008/02/john-ruskin-contd.html
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his to the Father through the features of men's faces. ~Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

In verse commemorating Lorca's death, Roy Campbell wrote,

Not only did he lose his life

By shots assassinated:

But with a hammer and a knife

Was after that -- translated.^[48]

Hopkins has faced the same posthumous ‘translation’ nightmares as Lorca.

Saint Claude de La Colombière||Saint of Hope

"O my God, in my very confidence lies all my hope. "For Thou, O Lord, singularly has settled me in hope." This confidence can never be in vain. "No one has hoped in the Lord and has been confounded."
=========
From the meditation today in Magnificat: "The rich man is condemned not because he is rich, but because he never even saw Lazarus at his gate."-(father John R Donahue,SJ)

Ora pro nobis, Fr Ciszek--Ar Hyd y Nos
http://newsaints.faithweb.com/index.htm

Our Lady of the 'Pomegranate'

Pinturicchio, Virgin and Child with St John, Altarpiece of Santa Maria dei Fossi-About.com Art History

Ars Poetica

Notes on the Art of Poetry

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on
in the world between the covers of books,
such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,
such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,
such and so many blinding bright lights,
splashing all over the pages
in a million bits and pieces
all of which were words, words, words,
and each of which were alive forever
in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

~ Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), Welsh poet

I have always contended in talking to missionaries that we are not so much to bring Christ to peoples as we are to bring Christ out of them…Christ is hidden in all world religions, though as yet His face is veiled as it was to Moses, who asked to see it. ~Fr. Louis OCSO [Thomas Merton]

I could say this of the poets Lorca, Campbell, Merton and Hopkins:

…Born in the black aurora of disaster,
Can look a common soldier in the face:
I find a comrade where I sought a master :
For daily, while the stinking crocodiles
Glide from the mangroves on the swampy shore,
He shares my awning on the dhow, he smiles,
And tells me that he lived it all before.
Through fire and shipwreck, pestilence and loss,
Led by the ignis fatuus of duty
To a dog’s death — yet of his sorrows king —
He shouldered high his voluntary Cross,
Wrestled his hardships into forms of beauty,
And taught his gorgon destinies to sing. ~Roy Campbell, Luis de Camões