Admitting Impediments: Engaging Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116

Note: By day, through most of the year, All Nine contributor Andrew Lazo works as a high school English teacher, regularly cajoling, threatening, wooing, enticing, bribing, and even tricking teenagers into reading thoroughly and, if and when at all possible, enjoying their reading, especially poetry. As such, he covets such kind thoughts and prayers as you might send his way; here he offers some thoughts as a kind of war correspondent on the front lines of the battle to make poems matter.

Admitting Impediments: Engaging Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116

Andrew Lazo

Image by Lancia Smith

My favorite recent CD purchase came from listening to an NPR report about William Shakespeare’s original pronunciation (OP). The British Library has put forth a record of thirty passages, and the first track has grabbed me and has not let go: Sonnet 116. You probably know it; you might well have heard it recently at a wedding:

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 

Within his bending sickle’s compass come: 

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

   If this be error and upon me proved,

   I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

“Ahhh,” we all sigh prettily. Who doesn’t love this sonnet? I surely do, but it also sets me to thinking about these impediments Shakespeare speaks of. I have friends with great marriages; I know folk not so fortunate. And I wonder what this sonnet has to say to all of us. Let’s have a look.

First of all, please let me clarify the key phrase in line 2: “admit impediments.” On the surface, the premise of the poem appears to call for the speaker to practice denial when looking at the sober realities of “the marriage of true minds.” It seems to show the poet begging himself to turn a blind eye to all the unpleasant realities he faces in his relationship. But in fact I don’t believe that Shakespeare means this at all.

And here my immensely practical Latin minor comes in handy again. “Ad” means “to, toward.” “Mitto mittere missus sum” are the principle parts of the verb “to send.” “Admit” therefore mostly means, “send towards.” Think of a ticket that allows you admission—to be sent toward the action. And “impedimentum” literally means “something that snares the feet.”

So to not “admit impediments” in this sense surely doesn’t imply that I should deny the downfalls, but rather means, literally, “Don’t allow me to send toward my good relationship things that will trip us up.” I think Shakespeare means to marvel at the goodness of love and murmur a quiet prayer against jeopardizing it.

Surprisingly, for such a popular wedding selection, this poem has an alarmingly large number of negatives, of dire warnings about fearful fates. While of course the poem serves as a praise of steadfast love, the poet manages to do so dangerously, with statements and images that, taken by themselves, might alarm us.

“Love is not love,” the poet says (before of course qualifying it—but there those words stand, right at the end of the line). “O no!” he cries. The poet finds his beloved altered, finds some force trying to “remove” the best bits. Tempests come. Ships (that’s what a “bark” is—think “disembark”) wander, and who has any idea how much such steady love is really “worth”? The beloved with her rosy lips will breathe her last, felled by Time’s inexorable “sickle.” It flies all too fast, and in the end of its “brief hours and weeks,” it slips silently over “the edge of doom.”

And at the end, the uncertain poet even allows that his high view of love might be a provable error; and if that’s true, it means that all poetry and love itself unwinds and proves false. Dire prospects indeed.

Perhaps a measure of Shakespeare’s greatness surfaces when we see how deftly he manages to laud love while using such apparently negative language. In the fourteen lines, the poet uses “no,” “never”, and “not” eight times—or about once every other line. He paints in this poem a kind of negative-space picture, portraying the very height of love by all these nay-saying verbal brushstrokes, displaying how very fragile we sometimes find our love.

Wow. Gulp. Such a wedding blessing, this. Mazel tov.

But I think this quality of potential danger circles us back around to the beginning of the sonnet, and makes that first two lines, the lover’s admonition to himself, absolutely vital (and “vital,” you know, means “life-giving”). What can give life to love? What can make marriages last?

Although I’m surely no expert, I believe that the frank internal dialog, this self-exhortation the poet offers in lines one and two, just may hold the key.

 

When he urges “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” I think the poet means a number of things:

• Oh, please oh please, don’t let me ruin this sweet thing we’re striving to assemble!
• Keep me from my own choices that might sabotage this tiny limited company, this business we build in our home.
• Keep my mouth shut when an unkind remark might swamp our small boat.
• Help me let go of my obsessive need to keep score.
• Help me take with good humor, with open-hearted laughter even, the very things that bug the living fire out of me about this person I chose. And while I’m at it, let me choose this same person again. Today. Right now.
• And please let them find us equally ludicrous, and so let us laugh at each other, and help to choose each other again. 
• Let me, each new day, soften my heart towards this one I have married, for how easily can these little hardnesses calcify until I’ve made my heart a stone? And how well we know that a stone in a shoe can cause the horse to throw the rider and, before almost any time has passed, the horse, the battle, the war, and thus the kingdom, are lost.
• Maybe if I learn not to admit or let in anything that snags or tugs, that sin that so easily besets, maybe then I shall find myself dwelling in the kingdom in which I’ve always longed to live. Maybe Solomon had this in mind when he warned his beloved to “catch the little foxes that spoil the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom” (Song of Songs 2:15). For sometimes foxes run through our blooming vines with their tails afire, ruining years of good wine with all of its attendant future joy.

A dear friend remarked to me not long ago that a good marriage absolutely requires “two very good forgivers.” I often say that anytime one has two perfectly good sinners under one roof, things can go downhill fairly fast. I’ve visited several friends this summer with great, solid, loving, and lifelong marriages, and they all have about them a kind of vigilance against impediments, impediments that usually come from their own foibles.

They have several things in common, these contented couples: selflessness, the profound sense in each of their own individual ridiculousness, and a deep-seated sense of humor about, and tenderness towards, one another’s failings—these mark the most successful marriages of true minds that I know. Not admitting impediments. Oh, they confess such things exist. They just decide vigilantly to keep them outside the door so that they starve and slink away.

This dear, sweet, difficult sonnet leaves us all with something. To the married, it offers a kind of primer on how to hold it together, an artful exhortation to watch the gates. To those who have lost love, it may offer an instructive and even actionable way to understand what went wrong. And to those who have never married, I think it offers both a heady warning and a hearty hope about what potential glories a marriage of true minds might offer.

I believe that this sonnet itself offers a star to all our wandering barks, which just might make navigable a dark night at sea.

The Swing of Poetry: Musings on Stevenson

All Nine welcomes Rebeka Choat to share her musings on Robert Louis Stevenson. Becka is a reader, a writer, a lover of the printed word, dedicated to bringing people books to nourish mind, soul, and spirit.  Her website is www.booksbybecka.com.

Image by Rebeka Choat

The Swing of Poetry: Musings on Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Swing" 

by Rebeka Choat 

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,

Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside ---

Till I look down on the garden green,

Down on the roof so brown ---
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Early some mornings before it gets too hot, Baby Girl the Second and I walk to the small park near our house.  She heads straight for the swings.  I push, she pumps, we find our rhythm, and this rhyme always comes into my head.    

It’s such a summer poem:  light and carefree, flying effortlessly into the blue, a simple child-like invitation to be wholeheartedly in the moment.  But this moment, me standing here pushing my little girl on a swing, melts into other moments and it’s my seven-year-old self soaring, hair streaming, Daddy pushing me, Mama saying the words somewhere in the background.  That still-small Becka was chubby and slow and clumsy on the ground, already always the last to be picked for any team sport, but oh! on a swing I could fly!

I’ve only ever been thin during one brief, almost-anorexic period of my life.  I’m still invariably slower than whomever I’m walking with, and I’ve rarely been accused of being graceful.  But oh! words give me wings!  Poetry lifts me up in the air and over the wall/Till I can see so wide – see woods on a snowy evening, and Addison’s Walk, and Innisfree, and Camelot, and Hatley St. George.  And it shows me familiar things from a new perspective – Till I look down on the garden green, down on the roof so brown – a pitchfork, a certain slant of light on winter afternoons, an old tree growing in the place that is my own place.  It reminds me to take time to enjoy simple, pleasant things; and when I come back – up in the air and down – I’m relaxed and reinvigorated, ready to look at the world with fresh eyes.

Reference: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171919

Paradise Found: Reading Milton in the Company of Friends

All Nine contributor-muse Dr. Holly Ordway shares her insights on the reading of (and listening to) John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Holly is a poet, teacher, and friend, as well as an apologist exploring the intersection of literature and faith, reason and imagination. Follow Dr. Ordway's reflections on the practice of living a holy life at her website at http://www.hieropraxis.com/ or on twitter @HollyOrdway

*****

It’s been twenty years since I read any of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In 1992 I was a college sophomore in Major British Writers I, and selections from Paradise Lost were on the syllabus. I know that I did the reading; I also know that I neither understood nor enjoyed what I read, and the paper that I wrote was probably awful and certainly careless. When I got my essay back, I saw marginal notes from the professor pointing out where I’d misquoted Milton; I remember thinking “How could she have noticed? This poem is about a million lines long, and she notices that I get a word or two wrong?!”

I hadn’t yet fallen in love with poetry, because I had not yet learned how to read it. It was the following semester (in Major British Writers II) that poetry “happened” for me, because my professor read the poems out loud to us. Robert Browning, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins - the music of poetry sank in, deeply, and after that I continued to read poetry and find the ways in which it showed me the world in new ways, and showed me the truth of my own heart.

But apart from teaching the sonnet “On His Blindness,” I never returned to Milton. I’d filed Paradise Lost under the heading “Works of Literature That Are Somehow Important But Certainly Not Interesting.” With so many other things to read, why go back to a poem I’d found dull?

Then I started to get some inklings that the failure was mine, not Milton’s. C.S. Lewis, whose writing has been and is so important to my own life and work, intensely admired Paradise Lost and even wrote a book about it: A Preface to Paradise Lost. As I began to read and study Charles Williams, I realized that Milton was extremely important to him as well.

This past winter, I had a Miltonic paradigm shift. I was visiting my friend Malcolm Guite in Cambridge, and in the course of an afternoon’s conversation about poetry, he pulled out a copy of Milton’s poem “Comus” and proceeded to read aloud to me a long extract from the poem.

I was spellbound. Here was music, philosophy, wit, beauty - wow!

And so when I got home I read “Comus” for myself - and loved it. But it wasn’t just that I’d been encouraged to read what I’d formerly dismissed: what made all the difference in my encounter with the poem was that I had heard the poem being read with vitality and understanding; the words had been incarnated for me, given to me in all their richness as something to be savored and rejoiced in right now as a present experience -- the complete opposite of ‘studying’ an ‘important poem’ and ‘understanding its significance’ and the like. A quarter-hour of hearing Milton read aloud that way opened the door to understanding his poetry in a way that countless hours of reading books about Milton’s poetry never could.

I knew I needed to read Paradise Lost - and now I wanted to as well.

But this time, I also knew I needed a friend to help me engage with the poem. So I turned to Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost - because although Lewis is dead, through his writing he is almost as present to me as a living friend. He loves the poem; he tells me why, and he explains how I can best come to love the poem too: by understanding what it is. It’s an epic, not a lyric: to enjoy it, I should read it in long stretches, feeling the sweep of it, being caught up in it - not stopping to analyze or linger over particular lines or images. Each of the poem’s twelve books has its own arc from beginning to end, and within each book there are long scenes of description or action, and long speeches by various characters, all of which are much more powerful if read through steadily - a book or at least a half-book at a time.

And that is how I have been reading Paradise Lost - and oh, it is a delight.

Reading it in a steady flow gets me into the rhythm of the blank verse and the music of the language, so that Milton’s words call up vividly in my imagination the scenes he describes: war in heaven, with Michael the Archangel leading the heavenly hosts against the rebel angels; the creation of the world and all its creatures, with the animals bursting forth from the womb of the earth; the conclave of Satan and the other fallen angels, each in their own twisted way attempting to justify their place in hell as better than heaven.

Reading it steadily has also helped me see the spiritual depth of the poem. If one reads just short extracts, Satan seems to have a certain grandeur and dignity; “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” seems almost plausible. But the grand sweep of Paradise Lost builds up, layer by layer, a clear-eyed and vivid picture of Satan that shows us the enemy of God as a constant liar, a vindictive spirit who would rather destroy anything he cannot rule, a narcissist who constantly returns to his self-created grievances with pettish indignation. It is a powerful picture and a chilling one, because everything that Milton puts into his character of Satan can be found close to home, in the human heart.

Now that I’ve been swept up by this grand poem, I know I’ll be back again, many more times: this, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, is not a book to read once and then shelve for another twenty years. I look forward to those future readings: all the more so, because now I know that I am reading in the glad company of friends: past, present, and future.

Audio References

For your listening pleasure:

• NPR Books: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97831678
• University of Cambridge: http://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/668015

Radishes pointing my way: Musings on Issa at the farmers market

The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
with a radish.

~ Kobayashi Issa

(http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-man-pulling-radishes/)

I found myself in the parking lot of the York Chamber of Commerce farmers market this morning, picking my way through the stalls of organic farmers, bread bakers, soap makers, jewelers, artists one and all. On a practical level, I was seeking tonight’s dinner (and my missed breakfast). Deeper still, my soul sought the moment’s moment. The new. The now. The fresh.

That’s when I saw the radishes. Or perhaps they saw me, pointing my way as in Issa’s picture perfect poem. It is particularly apt in this case that you can read “pointed my way” in this haiku at least two ways: “pointing at me” or “pointing me to the right way.” The first interpretation allows for an almost aggressive interpretation, the farmer brandishing the radish in my general direction. At the very least it could be seen as a bit overly friendly, waving a benign yet mildly threatening radish at me.

The second potential meaning, as in guiding me on the best path, is the more likely.

Either way, I could not pass them by, the radishes. They beckoned me. A halo hovered over their rosy gloriousness. I could hear choirs singing. They were cool and hard to the touch. I never drooled over the thought of eating a radish before, but these rosy orbs called my name. I could barely wait to cut them into spicy thin slivers over my garden-picked swiss chard and beet greens.  

I scooped them up quickly (before I lost my way, before the farmer threw the overly friendly radish at me), paid, and moved as if in a dream to the next stall.

It must have been that Disney film we watched last night, Ratatouille, about a rat who wants to be a chef. At a high point of drama, these grand words were placed in the mouth of a hardened food critic:

“…the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”

Indeed. Even these new radishes need a friend. That friend shall be me.

Of course, the critic was talking about culinary prowess disguised in the form of the most humble peasant food. But this could have been said about any priceless piece of art, poetry, music.  In fact, the critic goes on to say, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

And so I found great artists called farmers in a parking lot this morning, pointing my way, with a radish.  Now to the garden to pick my greens on which my perfect radish will rest.

Pressing His Ear Against the Hive: Andrew Lazo Reflects on Billy Collins' Introduction to Poetry

Note: By day, through most of the year, All Nine contributor Andrew Lazo works as a high school English teacher, regularly cajoling, threatening, wooing, enticing, bribing, and even tricking teenagers into reading thoroughly and, if and when at all possible, enjoying their reading, especially poetry. As such, he covets such kind thoughts and prayers as you might send his way; here he offers some thoughts as a kind of war correspondent on the front lines of the battle to make poems matter.

Image by Lancia Smith

Pressing His Ear Against the Hive: Reflections on Billy Collins' Introduction to Poetry
Andrew Lazo

Ahhh...summer break. For a teacher, this steamy season of blissful rest and recuperation promises so much more than it can ever deliver—no alarms, no complaints, no Sisyphean and self-replenishing piles of papers. In their place, I draw a contented breath, relishing glorious hours of reading my way down the tower of books by my bedside. Last week I shamelessly indulged in the luxury of pushing everything else aside in favor of a long, captivating book. I didn’t even eat until afternoon, so swiftly did the pages flip before my eyes. And when I was done, I found I’d forgotten about that curious hangover, a kind of stupor that settles over me for a day or two after I’ve submitted to a long book that will not let me go till I’d given it full due.

Summer also affords me the chance to browse lazily through those books I’ve bought not to read right away, but to keep on some shelf in the other room for those insomniac hours that the T’ang Dynasty poet Chang Chiu-Ling calls “the long thoughtfulness of night.”

Do you know such books? Products of casual rambles through a used book store, drifting to the poetry section, or past an author I vaguely remember someone raving on about. I’ll often slip the book off the shelf, roam around inside its covers, check to see if the pages have room for some penciled notes and an almost creamy quality.

And if the random paragraphs or first few stanzas leave me with a little grin broad enough to begin to feel a little self-conscience about visibly enjoying the book in front of others, I buy it. Such a shameless kind of public courtship often enough leads me to hours of delighted engagement once I’ve got such books safely home and into my dark and sometimes sleepless rooms.

So one night this week after pushing the little paper boat of another school year out into the pond, I did a little late-night browsing of my shelves. The results kept me up long past my now non-existent bedtime, and brought me delighted to former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. I must confess a fairly new but rapidly-growing obsession with his poetry, which I plan to indulge until I own every one of his works.

One poem in particular quite literally helped me survive more than one day of cajoling my teenage charges to read and enjoy poetry.  In talking about teaching poetry to his own reluctant students, Collins begins his “Introduction to Poetry” like this:

I ask them to take a poem  

and hold it up to the light  

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

And he ends it saying:

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope  

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose  

to find out what it really means.

As if anyone, even poets themselves, knows what a poem “really means.”

In general, rather than trying to trap some neat and easily-defined “meaning,” I invite my students to explore instead a poem’s ambivalence, its arresting images, and its particular and powerful sounds. I do whatever I can to see that at least once in their lives they’ve read a real poem in an authentic way that might speak to them. I’m happy to report some success, if their end-of-the-year journals are to be believed.

Collins’ poem has helped me to understand why I go to all this effort, for myself deep in long nights and for my students early on bright mornings. It’s all right there in line five. That one line in the poem stands by itself as if holding up its hand and waving it about in the middle of the classroom. Collins asks his students (who by now surely include me, and hopefully you too) to take a poem and “press an ear against its hive.”

Now there’s an image to ponder or to conjure with. Let’s just say for a second that a poem is a hive, and we press our ears against it. What might we hear?

First of all, it implies that, when pressing an ear to a poem, I’ll likely hear only indistinctly what happens inside of it. I find some comfort in the fact that I quite often come away from even the best of poems with only some vague notion about the import of all the activity happening inside it.

Next, it hints that in that hive of the poem, I may well discover that praiseworthy situation where a lot of males scurry busily about, attending to and providing for one female. This refreshing reversal of gender roles and pay equity, this way of turning of things upside down—don’t these alone suggest excellent reasons for visiting and revisting such a poem?

What else do I find by examining the inside of a poem? The structure of beeswax, of course, as deliberately made as it is fragile. Precise and repeated order, all made out of stuff that will easily melt away even as we might make candlelight out of it. Delicate and carefully-constructed containers of a rich and slow liquor—this too gives me an excellent way of thinking about poetry.

And these precise hexagons of course hold a thick, sweet, and golden goodness that will likely get all over me unless I wash it off well. Treasure, and a treasure increasingly rare as something is happening to the honeybees in the world. It occurs to me that poets may be disappearing at a similar rate to bees, much to my distress. Listening to a poem might just make honey drip out into my ears, and slowly sweeten the things inside my head.

I think I like this summer break. I think I like making a little space and time to wander through the pages of a book, as a bee ambles through a drowsy summer meadow.

And so I suggest that you find some new poems, and press your ear against them, especially if some time opens up before you during these swarthy months. And if you do, perhaps you’ll let me know and share some of the rich goodness you happen to find. And maybe that’s what the poem “really means.”

Pen phobia: writing through the fear

 “The real writer is one
who really writes. …
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.”

(Excerpt from “For the Young Who Want to” by Marge Piercy)

I remember like it was yesterday not being afraid to write. Maybe because it was yesterday. It may even have been this morning or two hours ago that I wasn’t afraid. But I am afraid now.

That is what it’s like when the bogey man sneaks up, silent, invisible, and pounces with a completely unanticipated panic, this weird phobia of picking up the pen, of moving it across the page. It’s a bizarre fear-feast that combines several sub-fears:

1.       The fear of having nothing to say

2.       The fear of having too much to say that is unresolvable, disturbing, or life-altering (in some nameless though painful way)

3.       The fear of writing crap

There are a number of logical ways to poke holes in these fear bubbles. On point 1, since when have I ever had nothing to say with my pen? Let’s move on.

Nat Goldberg (though I’ve never met this blessed woman, I call her “Nat” because I feel like I know her, having read so much of her work on this subject that I have yet another fear – of plagiarizing her without realizing it) says that (re: point 2) the disturbing stuff is where the energy is, and (point 3) that those of us who consistently practice writing will write crap a good deal of the time.  Crap is fertilizer. Be grateful for what grows out of it.

Since those fears are bogus and neatly dealt with, what is eating at me today? I realize even as I write that last question, the big “What’s-The-Point” horror is hounding me – the terror of meaninglessness. The world is already drowning in too many words. Everybody wants a platform, wants to be heard. What is so special about my words that anyone should read them?

And now I see the elephant in my peripheral vision. It’s over there, in the shadowy corner of my office, snickering. The big hairy elephant with pink bunny slippers, mocking me, taunting me, swaying his ludicrously large gray trunk back and forth, back and forth, slowly while he chants, “So, she wants to be a writer. So, she thinks she is a writer. So, the world could care less.”

Ok, let’s reason with the elephant. Maybe he’s right – I should give up my delusion. What does the world need with another writer? Maybe I can go back in time to a point when I wasn’t a writer, when I didn’t care about writing.

Sure. Maybe I can crawl back into my mother’s womb.

No, I do not remember a time when my hand did not ache to hold the pen, to move the ink across the page, to find out what my mind was holding out on me. For me, meaning is not a reason to write or not to write. I write through the fear of meaninglessness, even as I breathe through it. Neither the words nor the breath create meaning, but somehow I find it, on the other side of the fear. At the far end of the page.

The only cure to the fear of writing is to write. The “work is its own cure. You have to / like it better than being loved.”

Apparently I do like the work of writing better, since here I am still tapping away at this keyboard, meaninglessness yet unresolved. Me, I’m the one still in the room. The elephant… well, he’s long gone.

The Poet’s Work: A Reflection on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover”

I am honored once again to welcome poet, teacher, and friend Dr. Holly Ordway back to All Nine to share her insights and musings, this time on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Holly is an apologist exploring the intersection of literature and faith, reason and imagination. Follow Dr. Ordway's reflections on the practice of living a holy life at her website at http://www.hieropraxis.com/ or on twitter @HollyOrdway.

Photo by Holly Ordway

One of my college English professors remarked about The Windhover, “Nobody really knows what that poem is about.” At the time, I let that relieve me from the obligation to wrestle with it, even while admitting its beauty. Looking back, I wonder if I was simply unwilling to see what Hopkins was waiting to show me, for he tells us at least one thing pretty straight, in dedicating the poem “To Christ our Lord.”

I’ve traveled a lot of ground since I was an eighteen-year-old English major, and close on twenty years since I first encountered this poem in the pages of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume II, I find it one of my favorites, a poem that speaks to me in many moods and on many levels. Hopkins always gives me more than I can take in at any one reading.

One of the things he gives me is a taste of pure joy, so that I can recognize it when I feel it in my own life. I need the image of Christ as the windhover, the soaring bird of prey, free and dangerous and beautiful, because in my work as a Christian apologist, it is too easy to forget that my defense of the faith is the work of cooperating with the Spirit; God does not need my protection. Whatever I say or know about Him, He is “a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous.”

Most recently Hopkins has helped me as I learn how to be a poet. “My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!” When I feel that my heart will break for sheer joy, Hopkins shows me in the exuberance of his language that this joy can be expressed; that finding the right words and shaping them into the precise and constrained form of a sonnet, can be my response, as his was. “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume here / Buckle!”

When I do not feel that joy, what then? The Psalmist says, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” He does not say that the Lord will keep him from the shadow, but only that he need not fear it.

Hopkins gives me two images that show me that the dark and weary days, when the spirit is in the valley of the shadow of death, are not wasted days.

He says, “sheer plod makes plough down sillion / Shine”: as the plough’s blade is pulled through the earth, step by weary step, breaking up the hard soil so that it can be planted and yield the harvest, the grinding of the soil will polish the buried blade, removing any rust, so that when it is pulled from the earth at the end of the row, it will be bright and shining.

And again, with another image: “blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, / Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.” The fire is at a low ebb, the embers seeming almost cold; they are dull, ashy. But when the fire is prodded the embers fall out of the grate, and break - and in breaking, show their glowing insides, “gold-vermillion,” the color of blood and royalty.

From a falcon wheeling joyously in the sky, to ashy coals falling from a grate, Hopkins finds beauty and words to frame that beauty. Not a bad way to think about the calling of the poet.

Reference

Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works. Oxford World’s Classics.