The Priestly Poems of G.M. Hopkins. Peter Milward
barbarous in beauty.” The epithet “brute” belongs to the bird, with “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing”. The other epithet “barbarous” belongs to the stooks with their beards (barba in Latin) showing from the ears of barley. (Barley, you should know, has long beards, and wheat only short ones.) All this beauty is, moreover, here and now, in what T.S. Eliot calls a “point of intersection of the timeless with time”. It appears between two seasons of the year, summer and autumn, as it were cut in two by the farmer’s sickle.
“Now barbarous in beauty.” No wonder the poet, as he walks along the road, is filled with indescribable feelings of enthusiasm. As he passes the stooks on either side, he sees them in their form, piled together like the roofs of houses, pointing upwards to the skies. The word he uses for them, “rise”, conveniently rhymes with “skies”. There he sees them up above – not alone in plain blue splendor, but mottled, dappled with the white of “silk-sack clouds”. “Has wilder, willful wavier,” he asks, “Meal-drift moulded ever or melted across skies?” How conveniently the word “skies” chimes with “rise”!
“Summer ends now.” Now as he looks up at the skies with their moving clouds, drifting slowly in one direction before an unseen wind blowing above, his very language, his very choice of words, directs him from “wavier” to “Saviour”. It is as if the wilful waving of the drifting clouds leads him from what he sees with his eyes and feels in his heart to what he recognizes in the heavens as the greeting of Jesus himself, Our Saviour. “I walk,” he says. “I lift up, I lift up,” he repeats, “heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour”. Here we may note the repetition of “lift up”, denoting the upward movement of his eyes and his heart while walking along that road, apparently not minding if anything or anyone may be coming from the opposite direction.
“Summer ends now.” Now he turns from what he sees with his eyes and feels in his heart to ask himself, with yet another repetition, “And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?” In his mood of exultation he is always repeating himself, saying “one thing and the same” all the time, over and over again. He is breathless with enthusiasm, walking not so much on the road below as in the heavens along the “wind-walks” up above.
“Summer ends now.” And now out of the heavens, as in the ancient Christian past to Stephen and Paul, there appears to the poet a revelation of glory. There appears the form of the Saviour himself, reaching down to him and embracing him with rapturous love. Now he is no longer speaking to Jesus in his heart, but he feels the echoing sound “of realer, of rounder replies”.
“Summer ends now.” Now the poet, in moving from the octet to the sestet of his poem, is once again looking ahead of him, if only for prudence’ sake. But now he still sees our Saviour not only in the heavens above him, but also in the hills ahead of him. For now he sees “the azurous hung hills” – the azure skies in between the hills on the horizon as though hanging down and holding up the earth on which he is walking – as “his world-wielding shoulder”.
“The azurous hung hills.” In fact, everything is for him upside down. For now he is looking on Christ our Lord as a latter-day Atlas upholding the earth and everything on it, including the poet himself. How majestic he looks, stalwart as a stallion, sweet as the violet hue on the distant hills in the hour of sunset!
“The azurous hung hills.” All these images of Christ now come crowding into his mind as he directs his gaze from the skies above to the hills before him. There lies his collegiate home. All these things have been here all the time, he reflects, as if awaiting his coming to be put together in relation to Christ. Then still breathless, still repetitive, he exclaims in wonder, “These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting.” They were expecting him to come and behold them. “Which two”, he adds, like Milton’s Adam looking up at the starlight night, “when they once meet.” Well, we ask, after a pause, whatever next? “The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.”
“The heart rears wings.” All this repetition, one may say, indicates the breathlessness rising from the mind and heart, then passing through the lungs and into the mouth of the poet. “These things, these things,” he blurts, “were here, and but the beholder”, himself, “wanting.” Then shortly and sharply he goes on, “Which two when they once meet”. And there he lays special stress on “which” and “when”, not to mention the w-sound in “once”. And then back to the heart he goes on with, “The heart rears wings”. He takes up the “wings” alliteratively from “which”, “when” and “once”. And then we find him no longer walking forwards but springing upwards from earth to heaven.
“The heart rears wings.” Now it is as if the Saviour’s greeting “of realer, of rounder replies” evokes the poet’s practical response, no longer in word but in deed, of hurling for him, of hurling “earth for him off under his feet”. Now it is as if the poet is jumping up as he feels his Saviour reaching down to him in a mutual enthusiastic embrace. Now it is as if words have wholly failed him, however much he repeats “one thing and the same”. Now it is as if he is recalling what he tried to do in his previous Wreck of the Deutschland. “But how shall I… make me room there! Reach me a … Fancy, come faster! Strike you the sight of it? Look at it loom there! Thing that she… There, then! the Master!”
“The heart rears wings.” Everything in the poem, all the words the poet has heaped up like the waters of the Red Sea in the time of Moses, or the Jordan in the time of Joshua, now come to a climax in an ineffable, incommunicable, unutterable aposiopesis. For now his words, like the words of Cordelia in reply to her father, give place to silence. And now all he has to say is “Nothing!” And now, in Hamlet’s other words, “The rest is silence.”
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