Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
- The Kings of Missoula
- And the Great
- Inspiration
- Taboo against the Word Beauty, Ornithological Version on Aesthetic Theory
- Bearded Barley
- The Bowerbirds
- The Small Bang
- Dappled Things
- Fire
- Landscape
- Spare
- The Language of Pastoral
- At Buck Hall
- Pied Beauty
- A Dream of Hopkins
- A Simple Garden Ladder
- The Sleep
- Ghazal for My Selves, as Samson & Delilah
- Aubade for One Still Uncertain of Being Born
- Curtal Sonnet (with an Admonition)
- Confession to Hopkins
- Come to Me
- Hopkins in Kildare
- August Green: A Baptism
- Birds at Dawn
- The Acolyte
- To a Young Poet Resisting Hopkins
- Arrhythmia
- Goldengrove
- Date
- All Fall Long
- Strife
- The Bounds of Belief
- The Mind and Soul Growing Wide Withal
- The Horse on Zennor Hill
- The Tao of Alphabet
- Winter Mother
- My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Us Gerard Manley Hopkins
- A.M.: Her Lone Spark Dying
- Ascension
- That Necessary Evil
- The End of the Happy Hours
- One Wet Wednesday Afternoon
- By Eye-slit
- Come on the Cold
- No Fire
- Would Come Back
- River, Dissolution
- from Four Common Prayers
- Pater Noster
- Spring Again
- A Psalm of Ascents
- Poinsett's Bridge
- Reverdie
- The Telegraph Baby
- Red Kites at Tregaron
- Ark
- Saint's finger, Hill of Slane
- In the absence of a contract
- Ten Penny
- Red Bird, Black Sky
- The Tabernacle of Love
- Instructions to an Artisan
- Prayer
- The Christ-Frost
- Horse Apocalypse
- Migration Theory
- Never-Ending Birds
- Hopkins in Ireland
- Epitaph for the Journey
- Parable of the Red-Tailed Hawks
- Scoop
- What to Tell the Girl
- Finding Home by Taste, by Fire
- Winter Solstice
- Compline
- Elegy for D.S.
- Praise Song for Nikky Finney
- Coastland
- Breath and Bread
- I Waked and Fell
- Maple Gall
- Algae
- Aspen Song
- Left Behind
- Hawk in the Bronx
- The Canary
- Christ Imagined as Cavalry Commander
- October Trees
- Prayer to the Birds
- Dylan Thomas
- The Corpse Bird
- Speckled Trout
- Fall Creek
- Fossil Hunting at the Quarry
- Equinoctial
- A Question of Ear
- The Mercy Seat
- Savior
- Ornithology 101
- Oystermen
- Prayer with Fur
- Prayer with Game
- Collateral Damage
- These Fatals
- Elemental
- Via Negativa
- In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
- Knocking or Nothing
- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
- A Local Landfill's Invitation to Trash Left on the Moon
- Oil
- Ego
- Perspective
- Spouse
- Saw
- Breeze-Born
- Margaret's Reply
- Sea Journal
- The Baker Falls for Hopkins
- A Sestina for Mishima
- Ποιητική
- Meditation on the Hands of a Boy Miner
- The Acolyte
- Boy with Kite
- Jesuit Graves
- There Is a Balm in Gilead
- Michelle in Rain
- A Path through Walnut Trees after Rain
- Aubade for Yellow Jacket
- Afterword
- Contributors
Birds at Dawn
from The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
- The Kings of Missoula
- And the Great
- Inspiration
- Taboo against the Word Beauty, Ornithological Version on Aesthetic Theory
- Bearded Barley
- The Bowerbirds
- The Small Bang
- Dappled Things
- Fire
- Landscape
- Spare
- The Language of Pastoral
- At Buck Hall
- Pied Beauty
- A Dream of Hopkins
- A Simple Garden Ladder
- The Sleep
- Ghazal for My Selves, as Samson & Delilah
- Aubade for One Still Uncertain of Being Born
- Curtal Sonnet (with an Admonition)
- Confession to Hopkins
- Come to Me
- Hopkins in Kildare
- August Green: A Baptism
- Birds at Dawn
- The Acolyte
- To a Young Poet Resisting Hopkins
- Arrhythmia
- Goldengrove
- Date
- All Fall Long
- Strife
- The Bounds of Belief
- The Mind and Soul Growing Wide Withal
- The Horse on Zennor Hill
- The Tao of Alphabet
- Winter Mother
- My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Us Gerard Manley Hopkins
- A.M.: Her Lone Spark Dying
- Ascension
- That Necessary Evil
- The End of the Happy Hours
- One Wet Wednesday Afternoon
- By Eye-slit
- Come on the Cold
- No Fire
- Would Come Back
- River, Dissolution
- from Four Common Prayers
- Pater Noster
- Spring Again
- A Psalm of Ascents
- Poinsett's Bridge
- Reverdie
- The Telegraph Baby
- Red Kites at Tregaron
- Ark
- Saint's finger, Hill of Slane
- In the absence of a contract
- Ten Penny
- Red Bird, Black Sky
- The Tabernacle of Love
- Instructions to an Artisan
- Prayer
- The Christ-Frost
- Horse Apocalypse
- Migration Theory
- Never-Ending Birds
- Hopkins in Ireland
- Epitaph for the Journey
- Parable of the Red-Tailed Hawks
- Scoop
- What to Tell the Girl
- Finding Home by Taste, by Fire
- Winter Solstice
- Compline
- Elegy for D.S.
- Praise Song for Nikky Finney
- Coastland
- Breath and Bread
- I Waked and Fell
- Maple Gall
- Algae
- Aspen Song
- Left Behind
- Hawk in the Bronx
- The Canary
- Christ Imagined as Cavalry Commander
- October Trees
- Prayer to the Birds
- Dylan Thomas
- The Corpse Bird
- Speckled Trout
- Fall Creek
- Fossil Hunting at the Quarry
- Equinoctial
- A Question of Ear
- The Mercy Seat
- Savior
- Ornithology 101
- Oystermen
- Prayer with Fur
- Prayer with Game
- Collateral Damage
- These Fatals
- Elemental
- Via Negativa
- In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
- Knocking or Nothing
- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
- A Local Landfill's Invitation to Trash Left on the Moon
- Oil
- Ego
- Perspective
- Spouse
- Saw
- Breeze-Born
- Margaret's Reply
- Sea Journal
- The Baker Falls for Hopkins
- A Sestina for Mishima
- Ποιητική
- Meditation on the Hands of a Boy Miner
- The Acolyte
- Boy with Kite
- Jesuit Graves
- There Is a Balm in Gilead
- Michelle in Rain
- A Path through Walnut Trees after Rain
- Aubade for Yellow Jacket
- Afterword
- Contributors
Summary
In the false dawn
my campfire is the only light.
I stoke it against the cold.
Before daylight, birdsong
kindles from all around
till the dark smolders with their sound.
The rudiments oflight crack
the horizon like an opening eyelid.
Still invisible, birds are on the move
trailing wakes of lyric
I remember but can't identify
through the formless darkness of the sky.
Light slowly hardens into vision.
Glory blinds the edges of clouds.
At last I see them, follow them on the wing—
red-tailed hawks balanced like balsa planes,
dive-bomber catbirds,
cartwheels of martins, sparrows porpoising—
birds which had been sound become sight
as the mind solves the riddles of the heart.
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- Information
- The World is ChargedPoetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins, pp. 30Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016