Poems I Journey With 23

Who amongst us does not at times wish to return to the more innocent and carefree world of childhood as we remember it, if only to escape the monotony of our daily lives or indeed its many troubles? In other words, nostalgia is no bad thing once it does not become an obsession that prevents us from dealing with problems that must be dealt with in our lives. One dictionary definition of nostalgia describes it as a wistful desire to return in thought or in feeling to a former time in one’s life, and in this sense it is mostly sentimental in thrust.  But we are allowed to be nostalgic and sentimental sometimes surely?

As I sit here writing these thoughts, I am travelling back precisely forty-seven years to the autumn days of 1969 when I was in fourth class primary school. We had a wonderful teacher called Seán Ó Sé (John O’Shea) who was an erudite teacher in most subjects, but who loved poetry and gave all of us an appreciation for its form, metre, rhythm and rhyme. I remember well his beating out the rhythm of any poem, whether in Irish or English, with his “bata mór” or “big stick” which he actually rarely used as he was essentially a kind and caring teacher. He would beat his “bata mór” on his old wooden desk.

Portrait of Thomas Hood

After this brief introduction, let me offer the reader a poem called “I remember, I remember” from the pen of Thomas Hood. For me this poem brings me back into that old classroom when I was just a sensitive little boy of eleven years of age. So, I am unapologetically indulging in nostalgia and sentimentality now, and sure why not!  Thomas Hood(1799 – 1845) was an English poet, author and humourist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt". Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, the Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. Other poets that were his contemporaries were the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the many other lesser Romantic poets. Obviously Hood would not have been as famous, yet his work was indeed very popular. The poem “I remember, I remember” needs little or no commentary. It is enough to read it and reflect upon it meditatively and if it is sentimental superficially, I believe that it contains a certain deeper truth worth hanging on to. Enjoy, even for the briefest of moments. 

I Remember, I Remember

I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon
Nor brought too long a day;
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember
The roses red and white,
The violets and the lily cups--
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday,
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then
That is so heavy now,
The summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy. 

Poems I Journey With 13

A young GM Hopkins at University

Gerard Manley Hopkins was only one month short of his 45th birthday when he died from typhoid fever in Dublin, Ireland in 1889.  He had been employed as a lecturer in classics in the Catholic University of Ireland (the forerunner of University College Dublin) founded by the great Victorian John Henry Cardinal Newman in 1854.  The world-renowned literary critic Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, an expert on the Victorian period deems Hopkins to be "the most original poet" of that time. Such is Hopkins's originality and genius that he may clearly considered as influential as T.S. Eliot in the starting of the modernist movement in poetry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is also quite obvious to poetry readers that G.M. Hopkins's experiments with elliptical phrasing and double meanings, and even quirky conversational rhythms liberated the likes of W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas to give free rein to their freer and peculiarly personal rhythms. Here I'd like to share one of my favourite Hopkins poems with the reader.

God's Grandeur (1877, written when the poet was 33)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod

And for all this nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black west went

Oh ,morning at the brown brink eastward, springs -

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Commentary:

Rev Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

I don't want to mar the appreciation of this sonnet by superfluous or simplistic comment. However, some thoughts and reflections are demanded by this beautifully sublime text.  On the surface we will notice that it is written in the form of the Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet - that is a poem in fourteen lines that consists of an octave (eight lines) with the rhyming scheme abbaabba and a sestet (six lines) that has the possibility of either being written in one of two rhyme schemes - either cdecde or cdcdcd. The sestet above is the latter of these two schemes. However, Hopkins does more, much more, that is, he experiments with many interesting sounds within that external superficial scheme.  We note that the metre here is not that of "sprung rhythm" for which Hopkins is so famous, but he does vary greatly the iambic pentameter lines of the conventional sonnet. In that context, we notice the run-on lines between the end word "oil" of the third and the beginning word of the next line that is very dramatic and startling, namely "Crushed."  And the next nine monosyllabic words in that very line after the disyllabic, namely Why do men then now not reck his rod? are nothing short of wonderfully unique and sonorous in sound and tone.  They are all stressed syllables, one after another and highlight the urgency of Hopkins question represented in those words. I relish reading them aloud as all readers of poetry should. Like many of my teachers over the years in the area of poetry, I firmly believe the poems are written more for the ear than for the eye. In like manner, the next line contains the heavy falling rhythm of the repeated words "have trod" that come after the quick lilt of the polysyllabic "generations."  This technique recreates the sound of plodding steps in a striking onomatopoeia.

God's sustaining power over the universe is alive with an electric power that passes constantly like a live current through its many natural manifestations. The reader can trace this potent image of God's on-going support of nature through the poem in his own time.  The image of the olive press is also magnificently and startlingly potent.  This reader especially loves the lines:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell

because they capture for me the smelliness and dirtiness of our daily toil and thereby portray our struggle with our animality, fragility and mortality all imaged forth so powerfully in simple and direct everyday words. I also delight in Hopkins's portrayal of humankind's alienation from its spiritual and natural roots in the soil from which indeed he himself has sprung.  The very leather of his shoes or boots cuts him off from his oneness or unity with the very clay or soil of that earth :

nor can foot feel, being shod. 

In short, this poem reflects Gerard Manley Hopkins's conviction that the physical world  around us is like a book written by God, in which any attentive reader can detect the signs of a benevolent and caring God who protects and sustains that world like a great guardian angel:

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.