Tuesday, August 13, 2013

'In Life's Wild Wood'


Yo amo a las plantas por la raíz y no por la flor. ~ César Vallejo

OUR generation already is overpast,
And thy lovd legacy, Gerard, hath lain
Coy in my home ; as once thy heart was fain
Of shelter, then God's terror held thee fast
In life's wild wood at Beauty and Sorrow aghast ;
Thy sainted sense trammel’d in ghostly pain,
Thy rare ill-broker d talent in disdain :
Yet love of Christ will win man's love at last.

Hell wars without ; but, dear, the while my hands
Gather ‘d thy book, I heard, this wintry day,
Thy spirit thank me, in his young delight
Stepping again upon the yellow sands.
Go forth : amidst our chaffinch flock display
Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight ! 
Chilswell, Jan. 1918.             ~Robert Bridges, Preface, Poems of GMH 
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 ‘translation’ nightmares as Lorca. 
Angle of Vision
But, John, have you seen the world, said he,
Trains and tramcars and sixty-seaters,
Cities in lands across the sea --
Giotto's tower and the dome of St. Peter's?
No, but I've seen the arc of the earth,
From the Birsay shore, like the edge of a planet,
And the lifeboat plunge through the
Pentland Firth
To a cosmic tide with the men that man it.
   ~Robert Rendall, Shore Poems (1957).

no one will look into your eyes
because you have died forever…

Nobody knows you. No. But I sing of you.
For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.
Of the signal maturity of your understanding.
  ~Lorca, Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias 
Mariani finds Hopkins in these last years of his life dwelling “on his own bouts of near madness, melancholy, darkness, despair, even thoughts of suicide.” So Hopkins writes: 
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.
 
Hopkins’s bleak, brooding, and beleaguered final years in Ireland have been exquisitely captured in the black-and-white photographs of Michael Flecky, S.J., a professor of photography and fine arts at Creighton University, and recently published in the book HOPKINS IN IRELAND: PICTURES AND WORDS (Creighton University Press, 2008). Drawing on letters, poems, and spiritual journals, the pictures are of country places Hopkins visited during retreats and vacations, the Dublin landscape he encountered, the monastery, college, and seminary grounds he walked, and the Jesuit community and university buildings where he lived and died. The elegiac sequence of pictures is paired with excerpts from the writings of Hopkins and his commentators to offer a visual illumination of his poetic and spiritual life.
Hopkins died on June 8, 1889, just six weeks short of his 45th birthday. He was diagnosed with typhus, but Mariani suspects it was complicated by Crohn’s disease, a sickness unnamed until 1932. Hopkins’s last words, repeated over and over, were an affirmation—or a plea to himself: “I am so happy. I am so happy.” He died unheralded and unpublished, and it was not until 1918 that Oxford University Press published an edition of 750 copies of the poems edited and introduced by his old friend, England’s then poet laureate, Robert Bridges.
A decade before his death, however, Hopkins ruminated on the question of fame in an exchange of correspondence with his friend, fellow poet, and Anglican cleric Richard Watson Dixon. “Fame,” Hopkins wrote, “is a thing which lies in the award of a random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust judge, the public, the multitude. The only just judge, the only just literary critic is Christ, who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more than the receiver himself can, the gifts of his own making.”
Nearly a century later, John Berryman, a poet as singular as Hopkins, would appropriate Hopkins in one his last poems, a poem of his own religious conversion: 
Father Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ. Let me lie down exhausted, content with that.
“To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life”: in this line, Hopkins could have been speaking of the treatment he has received from his biographers.
The grandeur of God both sustains him and consumes him:
[T]his way of seeing into the heart of things would eventually cost him everything, for it would mean giving himself over to this new reality, deeper and more satisfying than anything he had ever felt, an unbearable lightness everywhere about us, and only the insulation of self-preoccupation keeping the self from feeling its staggering, terrifying sweetness and tenderness...           –Review of Mariani’s Biography of Hopkins 
    Ev'n sweeter yet their grace notes... Walter de la Mare, ‘The Rapids’, The Burning-Glass 
Rain drying on the slates shines sometimes.
A builder is repairing someone's leaking roof.
He kneels upright to rest his back.
His trowel catches the light and becomes precious.
  ~Douglas Dunn, Roofs on Terry Street

How cold it is!’
And on the roof-tiles a savage bird will cry.  -César Vallejo 
¡Dejadme entrar! ¡Vengo helada      
por paredes y cristales!                     
¡Abrir tejados y pechos                    
donde pueda calentarme!                  
¡Tengo frío! Mis cenizas                   
de soñolientos metales                      
buscan la cresta del fuego                 
por los montes y las calles.           ~Federico Garcia Lorca, from Soliloquy of the Moon 
WHEN the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
 
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight."

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand. at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?

And will any say when my bell of quittance1 is heard in the gloom,             
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its out-rollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?  ~Thomas Hardy, ‘Afterward
 
[1] Church bell tolling for the dead  
Mass at Dawn 
I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines
Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes
In whose great branches, always out of sight,
The nightingales are singing day and night.
Though all was grey beneath the moon’s grey beam,
My boat in her new paint shone like a bride,
And silver in my baskets shone the bream:
My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,
But when with food and drink, at morning-light,
The children met me at the water-side,
Never was wine so red or bread so white.         ~Roy Campbell

There are cooler nights in the mountain now, Fall’s messenger of change, but there have been dramatic upheavals hidden in the nether springs. September slips in under the August sun. The Sabbath rises quietly. 
Come! Descend
And offer me drink
Of stinging, falling tears
Assuage the thirst of my burning lips
Come! I thirst!              ~©Feast of the Transfiguration

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