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
The Bounds of Belief
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
“THERE LIVES THE DEAREST FRESHNESS DEEP DOWN THINGS.”
—Gerard Manley HopkinsDearest?
Anymore, such language
runs the risk
of being called extreme,
grandiose, too certain of itself,
bold beyond the bounds of belief,
quaint even—maybe, in some circles, reckless. Any
freshness
there might have been
has long since turned stale.
Doesn't the hunger still remain, though,
the ache, the reaching up
out of ourselves,
the palm at the end of the mind? Isn't there some deeper
deep
than what our words
can touch,
some farther far?
Where is lightheartedness?
Where joy, conviction, purpose?
Where plenitude of spirit, leaping about? Let's get
down
to the bedrock
to see if one exists,
to say a final yes or no.
In the light of last lights,
in this bent and broken world,
can there be wings brooding over us or the teaching of all
things
honest and just, lovely
and pure? Is uncertainty
our only certainty? Suppose questions
are only stall tactics
delaying an answer. What can that
mean for us, charged as we are to seek what everything means?
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- Chapter
- Information
- The World is ChargedPoetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins, pp. 38 - 39Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016