Over at the Guardian Carol Rumens gives us a splendid reading of ‘The Windhover’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Concise and cerebral, it contains illuminating factual, biographical background, set against simple structural analysis…

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,
      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 plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
      Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

from The Pond

Music, yes. And more. As Zach puts it in a post over at his blog, quoting Frost’s maxim ‘beware of the sound and let sense take care of itself’: "One has to work very self-consciously against the grain of language for it to lose its link to communication. While I’ve written a fair number of poems that can’t readily be paraphrased because they don’t have an explicit narrative, I’ve never been interested in the Quixotic task of stripping language of its status as tool of communication."

‘The Pond’ is the strongest in a strong collection of poems that I highly recommend you read.  I’ve been carting my copy of Track and Trace around with me during recent Book Hunter travels, reveling in its ‘rust-red lakes’, ‘green archipelagos of stranded Holsteins’, ‘worm lousy apples’, and traitorous breezes. A clever companion. My only beef with the book is its design. Seth’s bold black and white winter-scapes somehow interfere and detract from the warm pastoral valleys, muddy river-ways and fiddle-headed visions of ‘ruddled’ roads that Wells’ words conjure.

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Related posts:

1. Music to Read By
2. Putting Music into Political Categories
3. From Johnson to Lynch to the music of Jerry O’Sullivan
4. Music, John A. Macdonald and Memory
5. Celine Dion and How you can develop Good Taste in Music, Art and Literature

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 12:38 PM and is filed under On Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.