Sound and sense: “but I am now with you”
[NOTE: In one of yesterday’s posts I reproduced some photos of people when young alongside the very same people considerably older. Then I offered—without any commentary—one of my favorite poems, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I called the photos “heartbreaking, heartwarming, and fascinating,” but a couple of people took issue with the word “heartbreaking.” I’m not saying everyone should find them heartbreaking, but I’d assumed the reason I called the photos “heartbreaking” was explained in the poem.
Which brings us to this post, which is about poetry.]
I first encountered Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” when I was still pretty much a child myself, maybe eleven or twelve. My brother, three years older than me, would sometimes—in those boring stretches when nothing much was on TV, and his football practices didn’t intervene—show me interesting things he’d encountered in his high school classes. Thus, this poem:
to a young child
by Gerard Manley HopkinsMargaret, 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 heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
It grabbed me immediately, even though it was difficult—very difficult—for a child of that age to understand. But, just as Margaret in the poem doesn’t quite know why she’s weeping and yet (according to the poet) will come to understand the springs (that is, the sources) of her sorrow better as she grows older, I grew to understand the poem and its meaning as time went on but had “guessed” it right at the outset.
Why do some people love poetry and others either have no use for it or actively dislike it? I don’t know. In fact, since most of the people in my family seemed to like it—and two of the four of us actually wrote it—I assumed that liking it was the default position of humanity. I was an adult before I learned how wrong I was.
For me, though, poetry is something like music—that is, it enters the mind and heart through a different and more emotional route than ordinary prose. The best poetry encapsulates a thought, emotion, observation, juxtaposition, truth, or some or all of the above, in an economy of expression that also has a beauty of sound that resonates and amplifies.
That description is reflected in the title of one of my favorite poetry textbooks—one I also encountered around the age of twelve via my brother, whose teacher used it in an English course. In idle hours (of which I had plenty) I would leaf through it with pleasure, and I still have that dog-eared copy, complete with my brother’s notes. It’s called Sound and Sense, and is still in print today, albeit in a newer edition.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was a master of both sound and sense, even though his poems were unknown in his lifetime, and although a great many people still have a great deal of trouble with the sense of what he’s saying. That’s not surprising, because even though Hopkins wrote most of his poetry back in the 1870s and 1880s the works were unlike anything ever written before or since. Hopkins was avant garde, and in some ways he still is. He is completely unique, this lonely and almost certainly depressed cleric (like the new pope, Hopkins was a Jesuit priest) who was in conflict about whether he should even give his energies to writing poetry at all but was “unable to suppress his desire to describe the natural world,” a world that seemed to him to be awash in beauty to the glory of God.
Hopkins invented words and used meter in an unusual manner he called “sprung” rhythm, which he saw as a way to escape the “same and tame” qualities he saw in most verse of his time. His syntax is sometimes purposely complicated and sometimes very direct and clear, and the reader sees that especially in “Spring and Fall,” with its lines like “Leaves, like the things of man, you/With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?”—full of questioning hesitations and pauses, making the reader hesitate and pause too in order to understand what Hopkins is asking the child—followed by the clarity and simple declarative force of “And yet you will weep and know why” and “It is Margaret you mourn for.” No misunderstanding that.
I could go on and on analyzing the poem line by line. But this is not a poetry course (and it’s already getting late today!), so I’ll just point out a few especially lovely things that are part of the reason the poem gave me a pleasant yet bittersweet chill even back when I was a child, and continues to engender the same reaction in me now lo these many years later. Hopkins’ language is close to being over-the-top in its lush use of alliteration and sounds that echo each other. In fact, “lush” is the word that keeps coming to my mind. It’s as though his feelings are so strong they overflow into the language and push it past the usual boundaries into a surprising sensuality and abundance for a man whose life was apparently very austere.
But no one could ever use the word “austere” to describe Hopkins’ language. Lines like these, with their combination of unique words and harmonically echoing sounds show his lushness very well, as well as how he always stops just short of overdoing it (at least, to my mind):
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie
The only really difficult line in the poem, I think, is this one, “What heart heard of, ghost guessed,” and the reader is helped by learning that the word “ghost” refers to “soul” or “spirit” rather than Casper or the movie.
If you don’t like poetry, all of this will probably strike you as rather odd and uninteresting. My love for poetry might seem an eccentric although harmless hobby, like collecting Star Wars figures or model trains. But for me poetry is one of the quickest roads through the mind to the heart, and the fusion of both with beauty and grace.
Hopkins has been dead for well over a century, but he speaks very loudly nonetheless. We don’t know him, of course. But in a way we do, as another trailblazer poet of approximately the same era but who lived far away from Hopkins, across an ocean, wrote:
Full of life, sweet-blooded, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the Eighty-third Year of The States,
To one a century hence, or any number of centuries
hence,
To you, yet unborn, these, seeking you.When you read these, I, that was visible, am become
invisible;
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems,
seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were, if I could be with
you, and become your lover;
Be it as if I were with you. Be not too certain but I
am now with you.
I still have my copy, too! (of Sound and Sense). I still love that book, and there are a number of poems which to think of is to see on a page in S&S.
I’m impressed that you were so taken with “Spring and Fall” at such an early age. I didn’t encounter Hopkins till freshman English in college, but I don’t think I would have gotten him at eleven or twelve. When I did get interested in him, I read him so much that his best work took its place among works of art that I’ve heard or read or seen so many times that I don’t need to hear or read or see them again. But I should go back to him now and try some of the poems that more or less evaded me in the past.
I think “Pied Beauty” was one of the first to really grab me. That, and “Hurrahing in Harvest”. And I’m very partial to the dark sonnets, especially “No worst…” some lines of which come to me often (alas).
I recall having to read, while in high school, Ode On a Grecian Urn and it put me off poetry. Oddly enough, years later while watching Tyrone Power’s Razor’s Edge it was his character’s reading of The Day Is Gone, And All Its Sweets Are Gone! also by Keats, that got me interested in poetry. It was the first time I’d bought a book of poetry, a collection of Keats.
Since then, it’s been something of the experience of a political change story, in my case a gradual – from yuck, to not bad, to like it a lot. ‘Like it a lot’ started with Edna St Vincent Millay’s Recuerdo.
My tastes tend toward the popular – don’t think I’m ready for Auden.
“My love for poetry might seem an eccentric although harmless hobby . . . .”
On the contrary, Neo, the arts speak to each us in different ways and we, each in turn react in different ways to each of the arts. Hardly an eccentric hobby, but rather a revelation of one’s own innate passion for life.
I’ve always loved your blog for the clarity you bring to every post, and because you made the same political journey I did. But now I see a deeper reason — you love poetry and Hopkins especially. Whenever I find myself doubting the meaning of it all, I read Pied Beauty, and as I get closer to pushing up daisies, Felix Randall is much on my mind.
Neo said, “This is not a poetry course.”
Maybe not, but I learned something. Some poetry can be like foreign language to me. You have done a nice job of showing how to translate.
I get some poetry. Robert Service and Max Ehrmann grabbed me at once. I guess I’m a tad lazy and don’t want to have to dig for gold.
Listen, listen, just read it out loud and listen:
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, 5
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: shéer plé³d makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Now you’ve got me thinking of the Falcon 9. 😀
Neo, you might like this piece on the poem and its “aesthetic echoes” by English professor Margaret Soltan:
http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=32759
Our relationship to poetry is our relationship to ourselves: we’re not sure whether it’s love or hate (excluding the self-approving).
Mostly, we usually bully the issue.
But we do venerate those who are sure; we Thank God! for them; and
for that scrub from the outside.
Neo,
I think your comment that ‘poetry is something like music’ may explain my mixed response to poetry. At its best it is like great opera, in which the union of words and music is greater than either alone. I doubt if the words of Shakespeare or Robert Browning could be as moving for me in prose as they are in poetry.
Unfortunately for me, in much poetry I either cannot hear the music or the music obscures the words and I just end up befuddled, appreciating neither.
Perhaps it is similar to my limitation in appreciating painting. I am moved by much of the art of the 16th century but by little of what i am told is great art of the 20th century.
For junior high English I had a traditional schoolmarm who gave extra credit for memorizing poetry, such as Longfellow’s “Ride of Paul Revere.” I didn’t take her up on the offer, though a half century later I still know several lines from “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” – a poem which we studied but were not required to memorize. I must have liked the poem for the words to stick in my mind so long. [In spite of myself, I still know some lines from “the Ride of Paul Revere.”]
English teachers in high school and college killed my love for poetry. I did not like being forced into the “junior literary critic” mold.
Many years later as a substitute teacher in a 5th grade class of “problem kids,” I saw how the teacher had used students reciting poetry to successfully engage them.
After that experience in the classroom, while I never became a big poetry reader, I occasionally would SPEAK out while reading some poetry.
It is the SPEAKING of poetry that makes it stand out. Just like song lyrics.
I liked very much the rhythmS of the Hopkins poem. I like to speak in irregular rhythms myself. Some modern music also has irregular rhythm. Many interpretations of Chopin, a composer not so modern, also play him in irregular rhythms- which gives a jazzy feeling to a Romantic composer. I don’t know to what degree Chopin composed that way.Not so much a digression as what the Hopkins poem reminded me of.
Gringo: have you seen this?
Neo, I hadn’t seen that poetry post before. Thanks for the link. Amazing how decades later something you had stored up in your brain from your school days, the Frost poem, popped up. When at an appropriate moment in your life you were ready to interpret something of a fact you had learned – the Frost poem- you did so.
The text/interpretation, facts/analysis conflict has always been there in education. As I see it, one has to know the facts, know the text, before one can analyze or interpret. Which is why memorization has traditionally been stressed more for elementary school students than for college students. Elementary students neither have a knowledge base from which they can analyze very much, nor do they yet have the mental development to do much analysis or interpretation.
One instance of my favoring analysis/interpretation over facts/memorizing was in my English Literature class in high school. Our exams on Shakespeare were divided approximately equally between details on the plays and essays. At the time, I wanted ALL the exams to be based on essays. The teacher’s reply was, “If you don’t know the facts, how can you argue them?”
Some years later I took a Shakespeare class in college. I read every play twice – remembering what a fellow student in my high school English class had done to get an A.[She later became an MD.] Our classes were mostly discussions. Because I was more familiar with the details, I was able to contribute to the discussions. While the grades were based on essays, my greater knowledge of the details assisted me in the essays. For my efforts, I got the only semester A I had achieved in a high school or college English class. In addition, while English classes from high school on had been drudgery for me, I enjoyed this class.
I guess my high school English teacher was correct in requiring that we know details. He did know his Shakespeare, as he got his Ph.D. in Shakespeare after I had graduated from high school.