O the Craftsman|| each tucked string tells ...

The Fire of Christ

“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!”[15]”

O the Craftsman

But, when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness. - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

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    *“The truth is ultimately an act of love.”*  ~Bd. John Paul II,  Fides et Ratio

Introduction to the ‘Living Flame of Love’…

   Most probably John introduced these variations into the text while at La Peñuela in the last months of his life, August-September 1591. A witness who lived with him at La Peñuela told of how in the early morning John used to withdraw into the garden for prayer and remain there until, coaxed by the heat of the sun, he returned to his monastery cell where he spent his time writing on certain stanzas of poetry. By this date all his other works, including the Canticle, had reached their final stage. Moreover John brought a copy of the work with him to Ubeda. He gave it as a gift in gratitude to Ambrosio de Villareal, the doctor who had cared for him there. What must have been the doctor's thoughts as he read of "how much God exalts the soul that pleases him"?

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‘As Kingfishers…’

    Abstraction is the enemy of poetry and Hopkins did not need reminding of this: despite the essentially intellectual nature of his theme, there is not a single abstract noun in 'As Kingfishers...'. Hopkins, in full energy, makes the experience present rather than talking about it; and it is good to be there. Desmond Egan analyses this great Hopkins poem line by line, word by word.
Norman MacKenzie dates the sonnet to March or April of 1877 during the time Hopkins was in St. Beuno's and wrote nine sonnets in pastoral Wales. (These included 'God's Grandeur' 'The Starlight Night', 'In the Valley of the Elwy', 'The Windhover' and 'Hurrahing in Harvest' - all of which he dated; and 'For Spring' , 'The Caged Skylark' 'As Kingfishers..' and 'The Lantern out of Doors', which he did not). Surely a'wonder-year' - in MacKenzie's words and one which poet Paul Mariani, in his Commentary has described convincingly as one of growing metrical complexity: Hopkins at the height of his powers - or close to it.

Hopkins was was 33 years old. We are dealing here with a completed work of art. The imagery of the poem has a corresponding coherence - and is often, perhaps, not fully understood.

First of all, here is the text of the poem.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; myself it speak and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Chríst - for Christ play in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

It starts with a confident assumption: the simile of the first line is based on a comparison of succeeding metaphors: the lightning flight of the kingfisher seems to turn him into a firebolt; the sudden dart of a dragonfly draws (or attracts) a brilliance comparable to that of a fierce blue flame (MacKenzie refers to the blast of a blowpipe)…
MacKenzie suggests another meaning: that the sound tells of the creator - but it seems to me unnecessary to anticipate Hopkins's thesis - particularly when he is dealing with the natural and the inanimate insofar as each is uniquely itself, before he moves onto another level of significance. He is not quite ready to do that yet, until the bell comparison is made. This image includes an example of Hopkins's excited use of a technical term (I think of Shakespeare's 'know a hawk from a handsaw'. a hawk being a large trowel for cement; of Emily Dickenson's 'valves' of attention, referring to the valves or half-doors; or of Hopkins's own 'rung on the rein' in "The Windhover' of the same year where 'ring' means 'to rise spirally'. Poets enjoy such precise, technical words). 'Bow' means the sound-bow of a bell - the lower part, where the hammer strikes and where the note finds its greatest amplification. So: every hanging bell, whenstruck, throws out ('broad' is an adverb meaning 'abroad') its special sound or 'name'…

The movement in 'As Kingfishers..' so far, has been from nature, animate and inanimate, to what is man-made: from kingfisher, dragonfly and stone to string and bell… Each human, every created, and therefore 'mortal' thing also has one distinctive, defining function: a single raison d'etre, of which the earlier imagery provides reminders. It is interesting to see that Hopkins reaches for another metaphor to put words on this: 'being indoors each one dwells'.The metaphor, 'dwelling indoors', living inside oneself, can only apply to the human and not to kingfisher or stone or the like…

The image of Christ's 'playing', in line 11 of 'As Kingfishers...' may owe something - as MacKenzie suggests - to St. Paul's expression: It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2 19-20) Zo de ouketi ego, Ze(i) de en emoi Xhristos.

… In one of his short Commentaries on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius ('Contemplatio ad Obtinendum Amorem') written circa 1881, we read, All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them (,) give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him. (House ed. p.342).
… he invokes the concrete rather than any abstraction: the instinct of a genuine poet. In this regard, some lines from a recent Collection, The World Returning, by contemporary English poet Lawrence Sail are worth quoting:

As when you gingerly open prayerful hands to see what you have caught, that has been tickling your palms with wings or feelers, and you find only the thought of something bright and precise, that must have somehow zig-zagged back to the sky, its image too soon blurred to an idea. (Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, UK, 2002)

How easily a fresh moment or feeling can be lost in words that slide back from life towards the 'idea'.
… the word, meaning 'it is likely (that)'. If we understand the word in this way in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, the meaning is 'it is likely that /in the same way, each tucked string tells ...'

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~ Desmond Egan ,'As Kingfishers Catch Fire'. . . analysis of Imagery

Hope Had Mourning On

The Work of Mourning: “A Vale of Tears”

      'hope had mourning on'  ~Hopkins

Vale of Tears,  עֵמֶק הַבָּכָא‎‎, Emek HaBakha)

*The phrase vale of tears (Latin valle lacrimarum) is a Christian phrase referring to life and its earthly sorrows, which are left behind only when one leaves the world and enters heaven. In English, "valley of tears" is also used. The origin of the phrase is uncertain, but the most accepted view is that it comes from the Catholic hymn "Salve Regina", which at the end of the first stanza mentions "gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle", or "mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.*

   Putting psychoanalytic conceptions of self-transformation through speech in dialogue with early modern devotional techniques of spiritualizing the physical, this essay asks how Robert Southwell's poem "A Vale of Tears" constitutes a work of mourning.

…Contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of subject formation attribute immense importance to processes of mourning…is not simply a reflection on how one negotiates loss throughout one's life but more primarily how the subject is itself constituted by mourning: formed, that is, by and through loss. From this perspective, mourning is not simply something the subject engages in when confronted with abandonment; but, rather, the subject is itself an effect of loss-the product of a series of renunciations and compromise formations…

…Aesthetic and spiritual practices are, at bottom, modes of renegotiating identity, strategies of mourning aimed at confronting divided-ness while living out imaginatively the sense of self-unity that the subject is constitutionally deprived of.

…the process of psychotherapy operates by enabling the patient to "reorder the past contingent events by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come" (Language 18). In short, it is symbolic acts of interpretation that enable a subject to transform objectifying and traumatizing events into subjectively meaningful experiences. Devotional and religious writings often present explicit examples of this desire to mitigate feelings of meaningless and loss, centering as they often tend to do around the desire for identity with God as the absolute Subject, the source and the delta of all meaning…

This therapeutic dimension of devotional writing is evident in the work of the early modern Jesuit poet Robert Southwell, particularly his poem "A Vale of Tears," published in the year of his execution, 1595. Southwell's poem presents an unusually dramatic illustration of how the therapeutic efficacy of early modern religious poetry often derives from its careful organization, its movement from a rhetoric of division, emptiness, and loss to a language of union, identity, and wholeness. This movement occurs through the speaker's shifting disposition toward the Alpine landscape that he confronts in the poem. When the speaker begins, he perceives the landscape as a horror vacui, a wholly godless, objectifying, and alienating unreality. Through a process of poetic meditation, however, it emerges as an appropriate setting for a spiritually meaningful transformation of self that is enabled by an increased sense of God's presence. In this respect, Southwell presents a variation on the technique of spiritualizing the physical, a well-established convention that consists, as Saint Augustine says, in the knowledge that "every good of ours either is God or comes from God" (27). In "A Vale of Tears," the devotional practice of spiritualizing the physical consists in the act of relating elements of creation that appear void of meaning because they seem unrelated to God's goodness, back to their divine source. Through the poem's emphasis on paradox, visual and aural oppositions, and its insistent representation of an objectless but omnipresent mourning, it expresses the speaker's feelings of loss and self-division and his ultimate hope for union with God. The formal dimensions of the poem perform this movement from loss and division to the emergence of a meaningful sense of spiritual purpose.

…As Southwell puts it, it is a place "where nothing seemed wrong, yet nothing right" (line 32). To this extent, the landscape presents an encounter with meaninglessness, a scene, that is, w here God's presence remains indiscernible…thematic focus clearly resembles the meditative sentiments found in the meditations one sees in Saint Ignatius Loyola, where the practitioner "is to consider who God is against whom I have sinned, reflecting on the divine attributes and comparing them with their contraries in me; God's wisdom with my ignorance, God's omnipotence with my weakness, God's justice with my iniquity" (27).

This meditative process of focusing on one's lack in the face of God's perfection is…to admit: "I am divided and lapsing with respect to my ideal, Christ…”

Southwell's "A Vale of Tears : A Psychoanalysis ofForm.(Critical Essay)

Spring and Fall - Hopkins

Spring and Fall - Hopkins
Excerpt:
               Spring and Fall:
                to a Young Child
   Margaret, are you grieving
   Over Goldengrove unleaving?
   Leaves, like the things of man, you
   With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
   Ah! as 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 will weep and know why.
   Now no matter, child, the name:
   Sorrow's springs are the same.
   Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
   What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
   It is the blight man was born for,
   It is Margaret you mourn for.