#gerard manley hopkins

[apocryphics]

Gerard Manley Hopkins

[adventuresofalgy]

It was a fine, warm day in early September. In fact it was probably the warmest day of the consistently dismal year: one brief moment of glory at the end of a summer which had been exceptionally cold and wet, even by the unassuming standards of the wild west Highlands of Scotland.

After his long, long sleep, Algy was keen to be out and about adventuring again, so he flew straight down towards the sea and alighted on a rocky outcrop with a fine view across the peat bogs, dressed in all their autumn finery, towards the misty Small Isles in the distance.

For once there was little wind, and the light breeze which ruffled his feathers lacked the chill which was so uncomfortably familiar. So Algy leaned back happily on the rock and relaxed, drinking in the exhilarating, aromatic air as though it were intoxicating liquor. As he gazed at the beautiful colours of the landscape, he thought of a poem he had once read:

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies? I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies? And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic - as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! - These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

[Algy is quoting the poem Hurrahing in Harvest by the 19th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.]

[fictionadventurer]

Top five poets?

Gerard Manley Hopkins: The poet who got me back into poetry. His imagery and word-smithing are so impeccable that it sometimes makes me wonder if there are truly any other valid poets.

e.e. cummings: The poet who taught me to love poetry that requires analysis. Analyzing one of his poems for a class opened up poetry to me in a whole new way. The way that man plays with phrasing and structure and condenses so much into so little is endlessly fascinating.

James Whitcomb Riley: "When the Frost Is On the Punkin" was the first poem I ever found and loved on my own. To this day, I still like his folksy, straightforward style and impeccable sense of rhythm.

J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton: I didn't want to take up two entries with these two, so they share one. The more of Tolkien's poetry I read, the more I think he's vastly underrated as a poet--his sense of sound and rhythm is divine. And Chesterton can get a bit clunky at times, but when his poems work, they're as good as it gets--his imagery and rhythm and rhyme are phenomenal.

Sara Teasdale: Her poems tend to catch my attention when I run across them lately. They're nothing flashy, but I like her straightforward simplicity.

[apoemaday]

"The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less"

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; The times are winter, watch, a world undone: They waste, they wither worse; they as they run Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress. And I not help. Nor word now of success: All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one— Work which to see scarce so much as begun Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness. Or what is else? There is your world within. There rid the dragons, root out there the sin. Your will is law in that small commonweal.

[aloysiavirgata]

So lately I’ve been very grateful for friends and read something that likened good ones to someone holding an umbrella over you in a downpour. Even when it’s just a silly text that gives you a smile on a shit day.

Anyway, thinking of that made me hanker for a prompt: AU, either Mulder or Scully stuck in a downpour when suddenly a handsome/pretty stranger opens an umbrella over their head.

Cheers to the real ones.

It’s raining.

It’s been raining forever, she thinks. Since she buried him, her belly like a full moon. Her belly pulling at her hips. Since she delivered his son and put lanolin on her chapped nipples and went shh, shh, through endless colicky nights full of Mylicon drops.

Since she handed the stranger - Vanessa, but still a stranger - her son and thought Eili, eili, lama sabachtani?

Raining since then, somewhere. Cold and grey and numbingly staccato. Raining, raining. The sky so fleecy and low.

She’s looking up at his apartment, as she does now; her belly flat as a Midwest highway.

“Jesus,” the man says, canting his umbrella over her as well. It’s a big golf umbrella, pied, as the most beautiful things are. “You look cold in this rain,” he says, tall and handsome as the surgeon she planned to marry once.

Once.

“I left it at work,” she says, a little breathless.

The man smiles down. “Jacob,” he says, and holds out his hand. He’s heterochromatic; one eye as blue as her own, as William’s. One eye as strange as Mulder’s.

“Dana,” she says, a little hitch in her voice. A little sob.

She’s cold and cold and cold, even with her hair grown out around her hollow face. Even with Doggett, who says “Agent Scully.”

Even with Skinner, who says, “Scully. Dana, DANA.”

***

Jacob, didn’t he fight an angel? Didn’t he wait fourteen years for the woman he loved? She’s drunk on a mid-range Beaujolais, can’t remember.

Fucks Jacob so she doesn’t freeze. Doesn’t burn. It’s good and warm and honest and she’s so very sorry. She’s so sorry, his lashes like the fringe on a velvet lampshade.

Scully sees his umbrella against the wall, wet and black and white. Furled like the wings of a bat as she leaves. The moon outside is a crescent. A rib. scythe.

“I love you,” she gasps, to no one. “I love you always.”

Grief is love with nowhere to go.

It’s drizzling, noncommittal and misty. “Spitting,” Mulder would say. Oxford.

He would say it, if he were here.

***

Jacob calls, even when the sun is shining.

She doesn’t answer. She looks away.

He calls less.

He doesn’t call.

***

“All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.”

[uwmspeccoll]

It's Fine Press Friday!

This edition of the poem Pied Beauty, by the 19th-century English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), was designed, printed, and bound in Silver Spring, Maryland by calligrapher Rose Folsom using Adobe Photoshop and Gudrun Zapf von Hesse's Nofret type in an edition of 50 copies in 1999. Here is the complete poem:

Glory be to God for dappled things –    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;    Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;       And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange;    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:                                 Praise him.

Rose Folsom, a Wisconsin native, has been a leading calligraphic practitioner for decades, and she is also a Roman Catholic convert, a motivational speaker, and a lay member of the Dominican Order. Our copy of Pied Beauty is another donation from the estate of our late friend Dennis Bayuzick, who was also interested in Catholic theology, and is signed to Bayuzick by Rose Folsom.

View more books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.

[apilgrimsprogress]

O God, I love thee, I love thee, Not out of hope of heaven for me, Nor fearing not to love and be, In the everlasting burning, Thou, thou, my Jesus, after me Didst reach thine arms out dying, For my sake sufferedst nails, and lance, Mocked and marred countenance, Sorrows passing number, Sweat and care and cumber, Yea and death, and this for me, And thou couldst see me sinning: Then I, why should not I love thee, Jesus, so much in love with me, Not for heaven's sake; Not to be out of hell by loving thee; Not for any gains I see; But just the way that thou didst me I do love and I will love thee: What must I love thee, Lord, for then? For being my king and God.

Francis Xavier, translated by Gerard Manley Hopkins

[sivavakkiyar]

Gerard Manley Hopkins

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

Man I will learn about some Christian Victorian gay poet and be like... "he was absorbed in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts" and "religious imagery was his way of expressing the tension with homosexual identity and desire"... same dude. Same *sighs*

[extollingtheeveryday]

Gerard Manley Hopkins // "Spring"

[apocryphics]

[rueroyale]

Counterpoint, a collection

Bach's Fugue 4 in C# minor from Well-Tempered Clavier I, autograph

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers

Bach's Fugue 4 in C# minor from WTC I, performed by Kimiko Ishizaka

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

Uncredited illustration from The New Yorker, March 6, 2023

An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope

Thomaskirche, Leipzig, postcard

Original Print: That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire (Gerard Manley Hopkins), from The Wytham Studio

[stardewism]

a fond and forlorn goodbye to autumn.

-

into the unknown, patrick mchale / autumn effect at argenteuil 1873, claude monet / something told the wild geese, rachel field / kiki's delivery service, studio ghibli / a world alone, lorde / over the garden wall, patrick mchale / litany in which certain things are crossed out, richard siken / unknown / pied beauty, gerard manley hopkins / night in the woods, infinite fall & secret lab

[papenesque]

i love. people. i love the beautiful ones (everyone), i love people who read, people who listen to music, people who speak, people who don't speak, people who bite their nails, people who overthink everything, impulsive people, shy people, confident people, and people who are everything in between. i love spectating life, a viewer in the cheap third stage seats with the bad view, observing, imitating, adoring. the beauty of individuality makes me giddy with excitement, with the vastness of it all. the world is a work in progress that everyone is participating in: how many paintings, buildings, love letters, photographs, keepsakes, have been created on this earth and left for us to find, particles of love left behind by those before us. i am in love with it all. to know me is to know the millions that i am. to love me is to love the world and all that is beautiful in it.

glory be to god for dappled things

[realmoftheacornking]

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 heart heard of, ghost-guessed:

It is the blight that Man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

[saltwaterandstars]

JOMP BPC - 9th July - Handwriting

I have odd handwriting. It has its origins in me slavishly copying the very precise, very angular handwriting of the teacher I had a crush on when I was ten (shoutout to Miss Ashcroft!) Over the intervening decades my writing, like the rest of me, has got rounder and messier.

What I've written is an excerpt from The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I do love a poem with exclamations! O my chevalier!