Delphi Complete Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Illustrated) E-Book

Gerard Manley Hopkins

• Herausgeber: Delphi Classics
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Delphi Poets Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 551

Beschreibung

Gerard Manley Hopkins' experimental use of prosody and imagery has earned him the posthumous fame of being a daring innovator in a period dominated by traditional verse. The Delphi Poets Series edition of Hopkins offers the complete poetical works, with beautiful illustrations and a treasure trove of prose works to complement the poetry. (Version 1)

* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Hopkins' life and works
* An informative introduction to the life and poetry of Hopkins
* Excellent formatting of the poems, with line numbers - ideal for students
* Special chronological, alphabetical and traditional numerical contents tables for the poetry
* Easily locate the poems you want to read
* Includes Hopkins' letters - spend hours exploring the poet's personal correspondence to friends and family
* Special non-fiction section, with rare sermons and the seminal essay ON THE ORIGIN OF BEAUTY
* Also features Hopkins' journals and diaries
* Features a bonus biography - discover Hopkins' literary life
* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres

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CONTENTS:

The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Poems
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
LIST OF POEMS IN ORIGINAL NUMERICAL ORDER

The Non-Fiction
ON THE ORIGIN OF BEAUTY: A PLATONIC DIALOGUE
SERMONS AND OTHER NON-FICTION WORKS

The Letters
LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS

The Journals and Diaries
LIST OF ENTRIES

The Biography
GERARD HOPKINS by Katherine Bregy

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Leseprobe

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

(1844–1889)

Contents

The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

BRIEF INTRODUCTION: GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

The Poems

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

LIST OF POEMS IN ORIGINAL NUMERICAL ORDER

The Non-Fiction

ON THE ORIGIN OF BEAUTY: A PLATONIC DIALOGUE

SERMONS AND OTHER NON-FICTION WORKS

The Letters

LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS

The Journals and Diaries

LIST OF ENTRIES

The Biography

GERARD HOPKINS by Katherine Brégy

© Delphi Classics 2013

Version 1

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

By Delphi Classics, 2013

NOTE

When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size, which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.

The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Grove, Stratford, London; Hopkins was born at No. 87.

A plaque in memory of Hopkins, near his birthplace

Hopkins, 1859

Hopkins, aged 19, 1863

BRIEF INTRODUCTION: GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on 28 July 1844 at Stratford, Essex, now part of Greater London. He was the eldest child of Manley Hopkins and his wife Catherine, known as Kate. His father worked in marine insurance and was consul-general of Hawaii, and was also an amateur poet, publishing several volumes of verse, reviewing poetry for The Times and even writing a novel. Hopkins’ mother was similarly cultured and arranged for him to be trained in drawing, fostering her son’s ambition to become a painter – an ambition he harboured well into his university career and only abandoned for religious reasons.

In 1852, Hopkins’ large family (he had eight siblings) moved to Oak Hill in Hampstead and, in 1854, he began boarding at Highgate School. At this time, the young Hopkins became interested in the poetry of John Keats, who had also lived at Hampstead and whose work had a profound influence on Hopkins’ first known poem, ‘The Escorial’ (1860). Hopkins was also influenced by the strong religious beliefs of his parents, adopting an ascetic lifestyle involving frequent abstentions from water and various foodstuffs. On one occasion he collapsed after attempting to go three whole weeks without water, managing only a few days before his tongue turned black. Despite these misadventures, Hopkins’ school career was successful. His early poetic endeavours earned him the Headmaster’s Poetry Prize, while his scholarship earned him the Governer’s Gold Medal for Latin verse.

In 1863, he was admitted to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Classics. At Balliol, he was tutored, albeit for only one term, by the influential art critic and aesthete, Walter Pater and became good friends with future poet laureate, Robert Bridges. This was a prolific period for Hopkins, in which he wrote reams of poetry, mainly influenced by the Romantics and the pre-Raphaelite circle, particularly Christina Rossetti. Those verses that survive do not exhibit the rhythmic invention of his major work, but they demonstrate his continual preoccupation with recording the look and feel of the natural world.

It was also an emotionally fraught time, however, as he became troubled by his sexual attraction to other men, particularly to his friend, Bridge’s sixteen-year-old cousin, Digby Mackworth Dolben. There is no evidence that these intense friendships were ever consummated sexually and it would appear that Hopkins remained celibate throughout his life. Critics have argued, however, that his homoerotic impulses find expression in poems like ‘Epithalamion’, and that some of his religious poems allowed him to use the body of Christ as a means of reconciling an erotic and a Christian attitude to the beauty of the human form (both male and female).

Despite his active social life, Hopkins’ religious asceticism intensified at Oxford. He recorded his ‘sins’ in his diary, became caught up in the high Anglican ‘Oxford movement’, endorsed Pugin’s campaign for a Gothic revival in church architecture, composed highly ascetic poetry (such as ‘The Habit of Perfection’) and even considered becoming a monk. Finally, in July 1866, he decided to convert to Roman Catholicism and was formerly accepted into the Catholic Church by John Henry Newman on 21 October 1866. His conversion meant a temporary estrangement from his Anglican family, although they soon came to accept the move.

In 1868, following another sporadic resolution to be as religious as possible, Hopkins burnt all his poems to date and gave up poetry completely for some years. Around the same time, he decided to become a Jesuit, joining the Society of Jesus and formerly taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience on 8 September 1870. He continued to write, however, keeping a detailed journal and composing music, having learnt the violin. He also continued his interest in drawing and sketching.

In 1875, Hopkins took up poetry once more, writing the lengthy ‘Wreck of the Deutschland’, one of his finest and best-known pieces. The poem commemorates the death of 157 travellers on board the Deutschland, including five Franciscan nuns seeking to escape Germany’s oppressive anti-Catholicism. Hopkins completed this work after the superior of the Jesuit house, St Beuno’s, in North Wales, where Hopkins was undertaking his final studies before ordination, asked him to write a poem in memory of the event. The poem was accepted by a Jesuit paper, The Month, which then failed to print it, fostering a deep-seated sense of unworthiness in Hopkins that made him reluctant to publish his own poetry during his lifetime.

Whilst studying and preparing for ordination, he wrote a further series of poems, entitled God’s Grandeur (1877). This collection embodies the experimentation in rhythm and metre that was to be Hopkins’ main literary legacy. In particular, Hopkins is noted for his use of what he termed ‘sprung rhythm’. Conventional poetic metre consists of a regulated number of poetic feet, which in turn regulate where syllables are stressed. By varying the number of poetic feet and the number of syllables within it, whilst ensuring that the stress is always placed on the first syllable of each foot, Hopkins created a rhythm much more akin to speech, allowing for an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables. As stressed syllables are not necessarily alternated with unstressed syllables and often occur sequentially, the result is a ‘sprung’ rhythm.

Although Hopkins’ name is now inextricably linked with this unconventional mode of prosody, he claimed to have derived it from Old English poetry. The technique foreshadowed the free verse of modernist poetry and played a key role in Hopkins’ posthumous success with poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Another notable feature of Hopkins’ poetry is the almost overwhelming intensity of his language and imagery. Sometimes this involves effectively simple metaphorical devices, such as the comparison in ‘Heaven-Haven’ of a nun entering a monastery with a ship finding a safe harbour. Elsewhere, however, the sequential stressed syllables of sprung rhythm are used to pile up images to create dizzying contrasts, as in ‘Pied Beauty’ and ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’.

A related technique is the use of compound words or phrases (i.e. the creation of a new word or phrase from two separate ones), such as rose-moles or fresh-firecoal or, more challengingly, twindles – a term used in ‘Inversnaid’ to combine twines and dwindles into a new adjective. Again, this is a feature of Germanic and Old English poetry, which Hopkins appropriated. It is also a characteristic of Welsh-language poetry. Hopkins learnt Welsh enthusiastically and the repeated sounds of the compact native Welsh cynghanedd form are traceable in his striking use of onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme.

Yet, Hopkins’ innovations were not only formal and stylistic – his poetry was also an attempt to reflect a new way of seeing the world. Influenced by the Scottish philosopher Duns Scotus, Hopkins coined the term inscape to describe the particular pattern, cohesion or forms of beauty that a person either discovers in the natural world or thrusts upon it as a reflection of their own inner being.

Hopkins’ life after formal ordination in September 1877 was an unsettled one and he suffered from frequent bouts of melancholy as he travelled around the country as a priest and as a teacher and professor of Classics. A month after his ordination, he served as subminister and teacher at St Mary’s College, Chesterfield. In December 1877 he became curate of the Jesuit Church in Mount Street, London, then of St. Aloysius’ in Oxford. Whilst in the latter post, he helped to form the Oxford University Newman Society for the University’s Catholic members. Further ministering and teaching positions followed in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Sheffield, where his poetry reflected, with characteristic vividness, upon the sorrows, difficulties and joys of working class life.

In the 1880s, Hopkins finally settled at University College, Dublin, where he was Professor of Greek and Latin. Despite this new stability, Hopkins was more melancholy than ever. His English roots, eccentricity and dislike of Irish politics estranged him from his fellows — a gloom and isolation that creeps into the poems he wrote around this time. This body of work came to be known as the ‘terrible sonnets’, a reflection of the melancholia and profound depression they embody, rather than a judgement on their quality. He died of typhoid fever in 1889.

Today, Hopkins is recognised as one of the foremost poets of his age. His talents were not publicly recognised however until his friend, Robert Bridges, to whom Hopkins had (luckily for modern readers) sent a copy of his poems, published a volume of Hopkins’ verses in 1918. It was Bridges who introduced the habitual use of Hopkins’ middle name; Hopkins himself rarely used it, but Bridges found it necessary to differentiate him from Hopkins’ nephew, Gerard. By the 1930s, more poems had appeared, together with Hopkins’ letters and journals. W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and others all enthusiastically endorsed Hopkins’ work, whilst influential critics like I. A. Richards, William Empson and F. R. Leavis wrote of him as one of the greatest poets of the previous hundred years – a pronouncement now that few would discredit.

Hopkins in 1886

Plaque at Roehampton near London, where Hopkins studied to become a Jesuit

Robert Bridges, a close friend of Hopkins and future poet laureate; Bridges was responsible for publishing Hopkins’ poems in 1918.

An undated photograph of Hopkins as a young man

F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), the influential literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, who became one of Hopkins’ great supporters. 

The Poems

Highgate School, which Hopkins attended from 1854-1863

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Author’s Preface

Editor’s Preface

Early Poems

For a Picture of St. Dorothea

Heaven — Haven

The Habit of Perfection

The Alchemist in the City

Let me be to Thee as the circling bird

Poems 1876–1889

The Wreck of the Deutschland

Penmaen Pool

The Silver Jubilee

God’s Grandeur

The Starlight Night

Spring

The Lantern out of Doors

The Sea and the Skylark

The Windhover

Pied Beauty

Hurrahing in Harvest

The Caged Skylark

In the Valley of the Elwy

The Loss of the Eurydice

The May Magnificat

Binsey Poplars

Duns Scotus’s Oxford

Henry Purcell

Peace

The Bugler’s First Communion

Morning Midday and Evening Sacrifice

Andromeda

The Candle Indoors

The Handsome Heart

At the Wedding March

Felix Randal

Brothers

Spring and Fall

Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves

Inversnaid

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme

Ribblesdale

The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo

The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe

To what serves Mortal Beauty?

The Soldier

Carrion Comfort

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief

Tom’s Garland

Harry Ploughman

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray

My own heart let me have more have pity on; let

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

To R. B.

Unfinished Poems and Fragments

Summa

What being in rank-old nature should earlier have that breath been

On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People

The Sea took pity: it interposed with doom

Ash-boughs

Hope holds to Christ the mind’s own mirror out

St. Winefred’s Well

What shall I do for the land that bred me

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less

Cheery Beggar

Denis, whose motionable, alert, most vaulting wit

The furl of fresh-leaved dogrose down

The Woodlark

Moonrise

Repeat that, repeat

On a piece of music

The child is father to the man

The shepherd’s brow, fronting forked lightning, owns

To his Watch

Strike, churl; hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail

Epithalamion

Thee, God, I come from, to thee go

To him who ever thought with love of me

Author’s Preface

Our generation already is overpast,

And they lov’d legacy, Gerard, hath lain

Coy in my home; as once thy heart was fain

Of shelter, when 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.

THE POEMS in this book 1 are written some in Running Rhythm, the common rhythm in English use, some in Sprung Rhythm, and some in a mixture of the two. And those in the common rhythm are some counterpointed, some not.

Common English rhythm, called Running Rhythm above, is measured by feet of either two or three syllables and (putting aside the imperfect feet at the beginning and end of lines and also some unusual measures, in which feet seem to be paired together and double or composite feet to arise) never more or less.

Every foot has one principal stress or accent, and this or the syllable it falls on may be called the Stress of the foot and the other part, the one or two unaccented syllables, the Slack. Feet (and the rhythms made out of them) in which the stress comes first are called Falling Feet and Falling Rhythms, feet and rhythm in which the slack comes first are called Rising Feet and Rhythms, and if the stress is between two slacks there will be Rocking Feet and Rhythms. These distinctions are real and true to nature; but for purposes of scanning it is a great convenience to follow the example of music and take the stress always first, as the accent or the chief account always comes first in a musical bar. If this is done there will be in common English verse only two possible feet — the so-called accentual Trochee and Dactyl, and correspondingly only two possible uniform rhythms, the so-called Trochaic and Dactylic. But they may be mixed and then what the Greeks called a Logaoedic Rhythm arises. These are the facts and according to these the scanning of ordinary regularly-written English verse is very simple indeed and to bring in other principles is here unnecessary.

But because verse written strictly in these feet and by these principles will become same and tame the poets have brought in licences and departures from rule to give variety, and especially when the natural rhythm is rising, as in the common ten-syllable or five-foot verse, rhymed or blank. These irregularities are chiefly Reversed Feet and Reversed or Counterpoint Rhythm, which two things are two steps or degrees of licence in the same kind. By a reversed foot I mean the putting the stress where, to judge by the rest of the measure, the slack should be and the slack where the stress, and this is done freely at the beginning of a line and, in the course of a line, after a pause; only scarcely ever in the second foot or place and never in the last, unless when the poet designs some extraordinary effect; for these places are characteristic and sensitive and cannot well be touched. But the reversal of the first foot and of some middle foot after a strong pause is a thing so natural that our poets have generally done it, from Chaucer down, without remark and it commonly passes unnoticed and cannot be said to amount to a formal change of rhythm, but rather is that irregularity which all natural growth and motion shews. If however the reversal is repeated in two feet running, especially so as to include the sensitive second foot, it must be due either to great want of ear or else is a calculated effect, the superinducing or mounting of a new rhythm upon the old; and since the new or mounted rhythm is actualy heard and at the same time the mind naturally supplies the natural or standard foregoing rhythm, for we do not forget what the rhythm is that by rights we should be hearing, two rhythms are in some manner running at once and we have something answerable to counterpoint in music, which is two or more strains of tune going on together, and this is Counterpoint Rhythm. Of this kind of verse Milton is the great master and the choruses of Samson Agonistes are written throughout in it — but with the disadvantage that he does not let the reader clearly know what the ground-rhythm is meant to be and so they have struck most readers as merely irregular. And in fact if you counterpoint throughout, since one only of the counter rhythms is actually heard, the other is really destroyed or cannot come to exist, and what is written is one rhythm only and probably Sprung Rhythm, of which I now speak.

Sprung Rhythm, as used in this book, is measured by feet of from one to four syllables, regularly, and for particular effects any number of weak or slack syllables may be used. It has one stress, which falls on the only syllable, if there is only one, if there are more, then scanning as above, on the first, and so gives rise to four sorts of feet, a monosyllable and the so-called accentual Trochee, Dactyl, and the First Paeon. And there will be four corresponding natural rhythms; but nominally the feet are mixed and any one may follow any other. And hence Sprung Rhythm differs from Running Rhythm in having or being only one nominal rhythm, a mixed or ‘logaoedic’ one, instead of three, but on the other hand in having twice the flexibility of foot, so that any two stresses may either follow one another running or be divided by one, two, or three slack syllables. But strict Sprung Rhythm cannot be counterpointed. In Sprung Rhythm, as in logaoedic rhythm generally, the feet are assumed to be equally long or strong and their seeming inequality is made up by pause or stressing.

Remark also that it is natural in Sprung Rhythm for the lines to be rove over, that is for the scanning of each line immediately to take up that of the one before, so that if the first has one or more syllables at its end the other must have so many the less at its beginning; and in fact the scanning runs on without break from the beginning, say, of a stanza to the end and all the stanza is one long strain, though written in lines asunder.

Two licences are natural to Sprung Rhythm. The one is rests, as in music; but of this an example is scarcely to be found in this book, unless in the Echos, second line. The other is hangers or outrides, that is one, two, or three slack syllables added to a foot and not counting in the nominal scanning. They are so called because they seem to hang below the line or ride forward or backward from it in another dimension than the line itself, according to a principle needless to explain here. These outriding half feet or hangers are marked by a loop underneath them, and plenty of them will be found.

The other marks are easily understood, namely accents, where the reader might be in doubt which syllable should have the stress; slurs, that is loops over syllables, to tie them together into the time of one; little loops at the end of a line to shew that the rhyme goes on to the first letter of the next line; what in music are called pauses [symbol], to shew that the syllable should be dwelt on; and twirls [symbol], to mark reversed or counterpointed rhythm.

Note on the nature and history of Sprung Rhythm — Sprung Rhythm is the most natural of things. For (1) it is the rhythm of common speech and of written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them. (2) It is the rhythm of all but the most monotonously regular music, so that in the words of choruses and refrains and in songs written closely to music it arises. (3) It is found in nursery rhymes, weather saws, and so on; because, however these may have been once made in running rhythm, the terminations having dropped off by the change of language, the stresses come together and so the rhythm is sprung. (4) It arises in common verse when reversed or counterpointed, for the same reason.

But nevertheless in spite of all this and though Greek and Latin lyric verse, which is well known, and the old English verse seen in Pierce Ploughman are in sprung rhythm, it has in fact ceased to be used since the Elizabethan age, Greene being the last writer who can be said to have recognised it. For perhaps there was not, down to our days, a single, even short, poem in English in which sprung rhythm is employed — not for single effects or in fixed places — but as the governing principle of the scansion. I say this because the contrary has been asserted: if it is otherwise the poem should be cited.

Some of the sonnets in this book are in five-foot, some in six-foot or Alexandrine lines.

Editor’s Preface

CATHARINAE

HVNC LIBRVM

QVI FILII EIVS CARISSIMI

POETAE DEBITAM INGENIO LAVDEM EXPECTANTIS

SERVM TAMEN MONVMENTVM ESSET

ANNVM AETATIS XCVIII AGENTI

VETERIS AMICITIAE PIGNVS

D D D

R B

AN EDITOR of posthumous work is bounden to give some account of the authority for his text; and it is the purpose of the following notes to satisfy inquiry concerning matters whereof the present editor has the advantage of first-hand or particular knowledge.

The sources are four, and will he distinguished as A, B, D, and H, as here described.

A is my own collection, a MS. book made up of autographs — by which word I denote poems in the author’s handwriting — pasted into it as they were received from him, and also of contemporary copies of other poems. These autographs and copies date from ‘67 to ‘89, the year of his death. Additions made by copying after that date are not reckoned or used. The first two items of the facsimiles are cuttings from A.

B is a MS. book, into which, in ‘83, I copied from A certain poems of which the author had kept no copy. He was remiss in making fair copies of his work, and his autograph of The Deutschland having been (seemingly) lost, I copied that poem and others from A at his request. After that date he entered more poems in this book as he completed them, and he also made both corrections of copy and emendations of the poems which had been copied into it by me. Thus, if a poem occur in both A and B, then B is the later and, except for overlooked errors of copyist, the better authority. The last entry written by G. M. H. into this book is of the date 1887.

D is a collection of the author’s letters to Canon Dixon, the only other friend who ever read his poems, with but few exceptions whether of persons or of poems. These letters are in my keeping; they contain autographs of a few poems with late corrections.

H is the bundle of posthumous papers that came into my hands at the author’s death. These were at the time examined, sorted, and indexed; and the more important pieces — of which copies were taken — were inserted into a scrap-book. That collection is the source of a series of his most mature sonnets, and of almost all the unfinished poems and fragments. Among these papers were also some early drafts. The facsimiles a and b are from H.

The latest autographs and autographic corrections have been preferred. In the very few instances in which this principle was overruled, as in Nos. 1 and 27, the justification will be found in the note to the poem. The finished poems from 1 to 51 are ranged chronologically by the years, but in the section 52–74 a fanciful grouping of the fragments was preferred to the inevitable misrepresentations of conjectural dating. G. M. H. dated his poems from their inception, and however much he revised a poem he would date his recast as his first draft. Thus Handsome Heart was written and sent to me in ‘79; and the recast, which I reject, was not made before ‘83, while the final corrections may be some years later; and yet his last autograph is dated as the first ‘Oxford ‘79’.

This edition purports to convey all the author’s serious mature poems; and he would probably not have wished any of his earlier poems nor so many of his fragments to have been included. Of the former class three specimens only are admitted — and these, which may be considered of exceptional merit or interest, had already been given to the public — but of the latter almost everything; because these scraps being of mature date, generally contain some special beauty of thought or diction, and are invariably of metrical or rhythmical interest: some of them are in this respect as remarkable as anything in the volume. As for exclusion, no translations of any kind are published here, whether into Greek or Latin from the English — of which there are autographs and copies in A — or the Englishing of Latin hymns — occurring in H — : these last are not in my opinion of special merit; and with them I class a few religious pieces which will be noticed later.

Of the peculiar scheme of prosody invented and developed by the author a full account is out of the question. His own preface together with his description of the metrical scheme of each poem — which is always, wherever it exists, transcribed in the notes — may be a sufficient guide for practical purposes. Moreover, the intention of the rhythm, in places where it might seem doubtful, has been indicated by accents printed over the determining syllables: in the later poems these accents correspond generally with the author’s own marks; in the earlier poems they do not, but are trustworthy translations.

It was at one time the author’s practice to use a very elaborate system of marks, all indicating the speech-movement: the autograph (in A) of Harry Ploughman carries seven different marks, each one defined at the foot. When reading through his letters for the purpose of determining dates, I noted a few sentences on this subject which will justify the method that I have followed in the text. In 1883 he wrote: ‘You were right to leave out the marks: they were not consistent for one thing, and are always offensive. Still there must be some. Either I must invent a notation applied throughout as in music or else I must only mark where the reader is likely to mistake, and for the present this is what I shall do.’ And again in ‘85: ‘This is my difficulty, what marks to use and when to use them: they are so much needed and yet so objectionable. About punctuation my mind is clear: I can give a rule for everything I write myself, and even for other people, though they might not agree with me perhaps.’ In this last matter the autographs are rigidly respected, the rare intentional aberration being scrupulously noted. And so I have respected his indentation of the verse; but in the sonnets, while my indentation corresponds, as a rule, with some autograph, I have felt free to consider conveniences, following, however, his growing practice to eschew it altogether.

Apart from questions of taste — and if these poems were to be arraigned for errors of what may he called taste, they might be convicted of occasional affectation in metaphor, as where the hills are ‘as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet’, or of some perversion of human feeling, as, for instance, the ‘nostrils’ relish of incense along the sanctuary side’, or ‘the Holy Ghost with warm breast and with ah! bright wings’, these and a few such examples are mostly efforts to force emotion into theological or sectarian channels, as in ‘the comfortless unconfessed’ and the unpoetic line ‘His mystery must be unstressed stressed’, or, again, the exaggerated Marianism of some pieces, or the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism which hurts the ‘Golden Echo’. —

Apart, I say, from such faults of taste, which few as they numerically are yet affect my liking and more repel my sympathy than do all the rude shocks of his purely artistic wantonness — apart from these there are definite faults of style which a reader must have courage to face, and must in some measure condone before he can discover the great beauties. For these blemishes in the poet’s style are of such quality and magnitude as to deny him even a hearing from those who love a continuous literary decorum and are grown to be intolerant of its absence. And it is well to be clear that there is no pretence to reverse the condemnation of those faults, for which the poet has duly suffered. The extravagances are and will remain what they were. Nor can credit be gained from pointing them out: yet, to put readers at their ease, I will here define them: they may be called Oddity and Obscurity; and since the first may provoke laughter when a writer is serious (and this poet is always serious), while the latter must prevent him from being understood (and this poet has always something to say), it may be assumed that they were not a part of his intention. Something of what he thought on this subject may be seen in the following extracts from his letters. In Feb. 1879, he wrote: ‘All therefore that I think of doing is to keep my verses together in one place — at present I have not even correct copies — , that, if anyone should like, they might be published after my death. And that again is unlikely, as well as remote.... No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.’ And again two months later: ‘Moreover the oddness may make them repulsive at first and yet Lang might have liked them on a second reading. Indeed when, on somebody returning me the Eurydice, I opened and read some lines, as one commonly reads whether prose or verse, with the eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.’

As regards Oddity then, it is plain that the poet was himself fully alive to it, but he was not sufficiently aware of his obscurity, and he could not understand why his friends found his sentences so difficult: he would never have believed that, among all the ellipses and liberties of his grammar, the one chief cause is his habitual omission of the relative pronoun; and yet this is so, and the examination of a simple example or two may serve a general purpose:

This grammatical liberty, though it is a common convenience in conversation and has therefore its proper place in good writing, is apt to confuse the parts of speech, and to reduce a normal sequence of words to mere jargon. Writers who carelessly rely on their elliptical speech-forms to govern the elaborate sentences of their literary composition little know what a conscious effort of interpretation they often impose on their readers. But it was not carelessness in Gerard Hopkins: he had full skill and practice and scholarship in conventional forms, and it is easy to see that he banished these purely constructional syllables from his verse because they took up room which he thought he could not afford them: he needed in his scheme all his space for his poetical words, and he wished those to crowd out every merely grammatical colourless or toneless element; and so when he had got into the habit of doing without these relative pronouns — though he must, I suppose, have supplied them in his thought, — he abuses the licence beyond precedent, as when he writes (no. 17) ‘O Hero savest!’ for ‘O Hero that Savest!’.

Another example of this (from the 5th stanza of no. 23) will discover another cause of obscurity; the line

‘Squander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him’

means ‘Scatter the ranks that sally to molest him’: but since the words squander and sally occupy similar positions in the two sections of the verse, and are enforced by a similar accentuation, the second verb deprived of its pronoun will follow the first and appear as an imperative; and there is nothing to prevent its being so taken but the contradiction that it makes in the meaning; whereas the grammar should expose and enforce the meaning, not have to be determined by the meaning. Moreover, there is no way of enunciating this line which will avoid the confusion; because if, knowing that sally should not have the same intonation as squander, the reader mitigates the accent, and in doing so lessens or obliterates the caesural pause which exposes its accent, then ranks becomes a genitive and sally a substantive.

Here, then, is another source of the poet’s obscurity; that in aiming at condensation he neglects the need that there is for care in the placing of words that are grammatically ambiguous. English swarms with words that have one identical form for substantive, adjective, and verb; and such a word should never be so placed as to allow of any doubt as to what part of speech it is used for; because such ambiguity or momentary uncertainty destroys the force of the sentence. Now our author not only neglects this essential propriety but he would seem even to welcome and seek artistic effect in the consequent confusion; and he will sometimes so arrange such words that a reader looking for a verb may find that he has two or three ambiguous monosyllables from which to select, and must be in doubt as to which promises best to give any meaning that he can welcome; and then, after his choice is made, he may be left with some homeless monosyllable still on his hands. Nor is our author apparently sensitive to the irrelevant suggestions that our numerous homophones cause; and he will provoke further ambiguities or obscurities by straining the meaning of these unfortunate words.

Finally, the rhymes where they are peculiar are often repellent, and so far from adding charm to the verse that they appear as obstacles. This must not blind one from recognizing that Gerard Hopkins, where he is simple and straightforward in his rhyme is a master of it — there are many instances, — but when he indulges in freaks, his childishness is incredible. His intention in such places is that the verses should be recited running on without pause, and the rhyme occurring in their midst should be like a phonetic accident, merely satisfying the prescribed form. But his phonetic rhymes are often indefensible on his own principle. The rhyme to communion in ‘The Bugler’ is hideous, and the suspicion that the poet thought it ingenious is appalling; eternal, in ‘The Eurydice’, does not correspond with burn all, and in ‘Felix Randal’ and some and handsome is as truly an eye-rhyme as the love and prove which he despised and abjured; — and it is more distressing, because the old-fashioned conventional eye-rhymes are accepted as such without speech-adaptation, and to many ears are a pleasant relief from the fixed jingle of the perfect rhyme; whereas his false ear-rhymes ask to have their slight but indispensable differences obliterated in the reading, and thus they expose their defect, which is of a disagreeable and vulgar or even comic quality. He did not escape full criticism and ample ridicule for such things in his lifetime; and in ‘83 he wrote: ‘Some of my rhymes I regret, but they are past changing, grubs in amber: there are only a few of these; others are unassailable; some others again there are which malignity may munch at but the Muses love.’

Now these are bad faults, and, as I said, a reader, if he is to get any enjoyment from the author’s genius, must be somewhat tolerant of them; and they have a real relation to the means whereby the very forcible and original effects of beauty are produced. There is nothing stranger in these poems than the mixture of passages of extreme delicacy and exquisite diction with passages where, in a jungle of rough root-words, emphasis seems to oust euphony; and both these qualities, emphasis and euphony, appear in their extreme forms. It was an idiosyncrasy of this student’s mind to push everything to its logical extreme, and take pleasure in a paradoxical result; as may be seen in his prosody where a simple theory seems to be used only as a basis for unexampled liberty. He was flattered when I called him ‘perittotis’, and saw the humour of it — and one would expect to find in his work the force of emphatic condensation and the magic of melodious expression, both in their extreme forms. Now since those who study style in itself must allow a proper place to the emphatic expression, this experiment, which supplies as novel examples of success as of failure, should be full of interest; and such interest will promote tolerance.

The fragment (see facsimile, a and b) is the draft of what appears to be an attempt to explain how an artist has not free-will in his creation. He works out his own nature instinctively as he happens to be made, and is irresponsible for the result. It is lamentable that Gerard Hopkins died when, to judge by his latest work, he was beginning to concentrate the force of all his luxuriant experiments in rhythm and diction, and castigate his art into a more reserved style. Few will read the terrible posthumous sonnets without such high admiration and respect for his poetical power as must lead them to search out the rare masterly beauties that distinguish his work.

Early Poems

1.

For a Picture of St. Dorothea

I BEAR a basket lined with grass;I am so light, I am so fair,That men must wonder as I passAnd at the basket that I bear,Where in a newly-drawn green litter   5Sweet flowers I carry, — sweets for bitter.

Lilies I shew you, lilies none,None in Caesar’s gardens blow, — And a quince in hand, — not oneIs set upon your boughs below;   10Not set, because their buds not spring;Spring not, ‘cause world is wintering.

But these were found in the East and SouthWhere Winter is the clime forgot. — The dewdrop on the larkspur’s mouth   15O should it then be quench`d not?In starry water-meads they drewThese drops: which be they? stars or dew?

Had she a quince in hand? Yet gaze:Rather it is the sizing moon.   20Lo, linkèd heavens with milky ways!That was her larkspur row. — So soon?Sphered so fast, sweet soul? — We seeNor fruit, nor flowers, nor Dorothy.

2.

Heaven — Haven

A nun takes the veil

    I HAVE desired to go      Where springs not fail,To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail    And a few lilies blow.

    And I have asked to be   5      Where no storms come,Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,    And out of the swing of the sea.

3.

The Habit of Perfection

ELECTED Silence, sing to meAnd beat upon my whorlèd ear,Pipe me to pastures still and beThe music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:   5It is the shut, the curfew sentFrom there where all surrenders comeWhich only makes you eloquent.

Be shellèd, eyes, with double darkAnd find the uncreated light:   10This ruck and reel which you remarkCoils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,Desire not to be rinsed with wine:The can must be so sweet, the crust   15So fresh that come in fasts divine!

Nostrils, your careless breath that spendUpon the stir and keep of pride,What relish shall the censers sendAlong the sanctuary side!   20

O feel-of-primrose hands, O feetThat want the yield of plushy sward,But you shall walk the golden streetAnd you unhouse and house the Lord.

And, Poverty, be thou the bride   25And now the marriage feast begun,And lily-coloured clothes provide

The Alchemist in the City

My window shews the travelling clouds, Leaves spent, new seasons, alter’d sky, The making and the melting crowds: The whole world passes; I stand by.

They do not waste their meted hours, But men and masters plan and build: I see the crowning of their towers, And happy promises fulfill’d.

And I - perhaps if my intentCould count on prediluvian age, The labours I should then have spentMight so attain their heritage,

But now before the pot can glowWith not to be discover’d gold, At length the bellows shall not blow, The furnace shall at last be cold.

Yet it is now too late to healThe incapable and cumbrous shameWhich makes me when with men I dealMore powerless than the blind or lame.

No, I should love the city lessEven than this my thankless lore; But I desire the wildernessOr weeded landslips of the shore.

I walk my breezy belvedereTo watch the low or levant sun, I see the city pigeons veer, I mark the tower swallows run

Between the tower-top and the groundBelow me in the bearing air; Then find in the horizon-roundOne spot and hunger to be there.

And then I hate the most that loreThat holds no promise of success; Then sweetest seems the houseless shore, Then free and kind the wilderness,

Or ancient mounds that cover bones, Or rocks where rockdoves do repairAnd trees of terebinth and stonesAnd silence and a gulf of air.

There on a long and squared height After the sunset I would lie, And pierce the yellow waxen lightWith free long looking, ere I die.

Let me be to Thee as the circling bird

Let me be to Thee as the circling bird, Or bat with tender and air-crisping wingsThat shapes in half-light his departing rings, From both of whom a changeless note is heard.I have found my music in a common word, Trying each pleasurable throat that singsAnd every praised sequence of sweet strings, And know infallibly which I preferred.

The authentic cadence was discovered lateWhich ends those only strains that I approve, And other science all gone out of dateAnd minor sweetness scarce made mention of: I have found the dominant of my range and state - Love, O my God, to call Thee Love and Love.

Poems 1876–1889

4.

The Wreck of the Deutschland

To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns exiles by the Falk Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th.    1875

PART THE FIRST

1

            THOU mastering me        God! giver of breath and bread;    World’s strand, sway of the sea;        Lord of living and dead;Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,   5And after it almost unmade, what with dread,    Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

2

            I did say yes        O at lightning and lashed rod;   10    Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess        Thy terror, O Christ, O God;Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod    Hard down with a horror of height:   15And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

3

            The frown of his face        Before me, the hurtle of hell    Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?        I whirled out wings that spell   20And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,    Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

4

            I am soft sift   25        In an hourglass — at the wall    Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,        And it crowds and it combs to the fall;I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall   30    Fells or flanks of the voel, a veinOf the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

5

            I kiss my hand        To the stars, lovely-asunder    Starlight, wafting him out of it; and   35        Glow, glory in thunder;Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,    His mystery must be instressed, stressed;For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.   40

6

            Not out of his bliss        Springs the stress felt    Nor first from heaven (and few know this)        Swings the stroke dealt — Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,   45That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt —     But it rides time like riding a river(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).

7

            It dates from day        Of his going in Galilee;   50    Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;        Manger, maiden’s knee;The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat;Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be,    Though felt before, though in high flood yet — 55What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,

8

            Is out with it! Oh,        We lash with the best or worst    Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe        Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,   60Gush! — flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,Brim, in a flash, full! — Hither then, last or first,    To hero of Calvary, Christ, ‘s feet — Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it — men go.

9

            Be adored among men,   65        God, three-numberèd form;    Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,        Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;   70    Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

10

            With an anvil-ding        And with fire in him forge thy will    Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring   75        Through him, melt him but master him still:Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill,    Make mercy in all of us, out of us allMastery, but be adored, but be adored King.   80

PART THE SECOND

11

        ‘Some find me a sword; some        The flange and the rail; flame,    Fang, or flood’ goes Death on drum,        And storms bugle his fame.But wé dream we are rooted in earth — Dust!   85Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,    Wave with the meadow, forget that there mustThe sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.

12

        On Saturday sailed from Bremen,        American-outward-bound,   90    Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,        Two hundred souls in the round — O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessingThe goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;    Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing   95Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?

13

        Into the snows she sweeps,        Hurling the haven behind,    The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,        For the infinite air is unkind,   100And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;    Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snowSpins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

14

        She drove in the dark to leeward,   105        She struck — not a reef or a rock    But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her        Dead to the Kentish Knock;And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel:The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;   110    And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheelIdle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.

15

        Hope had grown grey hairs,        Hope had mourning on,    Trenched with tears, carved with cares,   115        Hope was twelve hours gone;And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a dayNor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone,    And lives at last were washing away:To the shrouds they took, — they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.   120

16

        One stirred from the rigging to save        The wild woman-kind below,    With a rope’s end round the man, handy and brave —         He was pitched to his death at a blow,For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:   125They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro    Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he doWith the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?

17

        They fought with God’s cold —         And they could not and fell to the deck   130    (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled        With the sea-romp over the wreck.Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,The woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check —     Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,   135A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.

18

        Ah, touched in your bower of bone        Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,    Have you! make words break from me here all alone,        Do you! — mother of being in me, heart.   140O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth,Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start!    Never-eldering revel and river of youth,What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?

19

        Sister, a sister calling   145        A master, her master and mine! —     And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling;        The rash smart sloggering brineBlinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one;Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine   150    Ears, and the call of the tall nunTo the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm’s brawling.

20

        She was first of a five and came        Of a coifèd sisterhood.    (O Deutschland, double a desperate name!   155        O world wide of its good!But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,Christ’s lily and beast of the waste wood:    From life’s dawn it is drawn down,Abel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.)   160

21

        Loathed for a love men knew in them,        Banned by the land of their birth,    Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;        Surf, snow, river and earthGnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light;   165Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,    Thou martyr-master: in thy sightStorm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers — sweet heaven was astrew in them.

22

        Five! the finding and sake        And cipher of suffering Christ.   170    Mark, the mark is of man’s make        And the word of it Sacrificed.But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced —     Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token   175For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.

23

        Joy fall to thee, father Francis,        Drawn to the Life that died;    With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his        Lovescape crucified   180And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughtersAnd five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,    Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.

24

        Away in the loveable west,   185        On a pastoral forehead of Wales,    I was under a roof here, I was at rest,        And they the prey of the gales;She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thicklyFalling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails   190    Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’:The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.

25

        The majesty! what did she mean?        Breathe, arch and original Breath.    Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been?   195        Breathe, body of lovely Death.They were else-minded then, altogether, the menWoke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth.    Or is it that she cried for the crown then,The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?   200

26

        For how to the heart’s cheering        The down-dugged ground-hugged grey    Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing        Of pied and peeled May!Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,   205With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,    What by your measure is the heaven of desire,The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?

27

        No, but it was not these.        The jading and jar of the cart,   210    Time’s tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease        Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart,Not danger, electrical horror; then further it findsThe appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart:    Other, I gather, in measure her mind’s   215Burden, in wind’s burly and beat of endragonèd seas.

28

        But how shall I … make me room there:        Reach me a … Fancy, come faster —     Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there,        Thing that she … there then! the Master,   220Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head:He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her;    Do, deal, lord it with living and dead;Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there.

29

        Ah! there was a heart right!   225        There was single eye!    Read the unshapeable shock night        And knew the who and the why;Wording it how but by him that present and past,Heaven and earth are word of, worded by? — 230    The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blastTarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light.

30

        Jesu, heart’s light,        Jesu, maid’s son,    What was the feast followed the night   235        Thou hadst glory of this nun? — Feast of the one woman without stain.For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done;    But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.   240

31

        Well, she has thee for the pain, for the        Patience; but pity of the rest of them!    Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the        Comfortless unconfessed of them — No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence   245Finger of a tender of; O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the    Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, andStartle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?

32

        I admire thee, master of the tides,        Of the Yore-flood, of the year’s fall;   250    The recurb and the recovery of the gulf’s sides,        The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall;Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;Ground of being, and granite of it: past all    Grasp God, throned behind   255Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides;

33

        With a mercy that outrides        The all of water, an ark    For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides        Lower than death and the dark;   260A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,The-last-breath penitent spirits — the uttermost mark    Our passion-plungèd giant risen,The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.

34

        Now burn, new born to the world,   265        Doubled-naturèd name,    The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled        Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;   270    Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.

35

        Dame, at our door        Drowned, and among our shoals,    Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward:   275        Our King back, oh, upon English souls!Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,    Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.   280

5.

Penmaen Pool

For the Visitors’ Book at the Inn

WHO long for rest, who look for pleasureAway from counter, court, or schoolO where live well your lease of leisureBut here at, here at Penmaen Pool?

You’ll dare the Alp? you’ll dart the skiff? — 5Each sport has here its tackle and tool:Come, plant the staff by Cadair cliff;Come, swing the sculls on Penmaen Pool.

What’s yonder? — Grizzled Dyphwys dim:The triple-hummocked Giant’s stool,   10Hoar messmate, hobs and nobs with himTo halve the bowl of Penmaen Pool.

And all the landscape under survey,At tranquil turns, by nature’s rule,Rides repeated topsyturvy   15In frank, in fairy Penmaen Pool.

And Charles’s Wain, the wondrous seven,And sheep-flock clouds like worlds of wool,