Poem: For the Lost Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2012)

A poem about poetry - doesn't that sound fun?  Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems are like none I've ever read before.  They're extraordinary, and far too many of them are gone. 

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For the Lost Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

 

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins,

Feeling the spur of the Catholic call,

Gave poetry up for lent.

 

He thought this would purge him

Of sinful pride,

Not seeing that God’s glory

Soaked through every line,

And in 1868,

He set fire to his early work.

 

Paper and ink

Made fair fodder for the flames,

But more than paper and ink

Went up.

 

In that bonfire,

Over seven years’ worth

Of his soul,

Startlingly reshaped into meter and rhyme,

Scattered into ashes.

 

It would be another seven years

Before he would set his soul to paper again

And weave it into silken stanzas

Of kingfishers and kestrels,

Shipwrecks, and endless hours

Waiting for daybreak.

 

But in 1868,

Far too many phrases

Charred black and crumbled,

Swallowed by an incendiary appetite

Greedy for assonance and sprung rhythm.

 

Of those early pieces,

Only sainted fragments remain,

Safely harbored in the margins

Of neglected notebooks

Or preserved in the folds of letters

To friends who understood what they held.

 

These rescued words

Are just bits of shining scraps –

Half-poems with no end or beginning,

As if their pages were caught by the wind

And carried from the blaze

Only after their edges started to singe;

Or lonely single lines

That float like smoke-wisps

Out of context,

Their rhymes long smoldered away.