Yes, thanks! Hopkins I've always found difficult but completely fascinating. I tried to set this poem (possibly his most famous) as a student; but I didn't do it very well. How could you?

The Windhover

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- 
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding 
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding 
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing 
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,         
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding 
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding 
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! 
 
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here 
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion         
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! 
 
  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion 
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, 
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Just re-read No worst there is none.  I never appreciated it when I did A level.  Reading it now it is magnificent.

But...

I was reading Philip Larkin yesterday, and for an account of staring into the abyss, he is far more chilling to me, through comparative understatement.  (The deep blue air, that is Nothing, and leads nowhere and is endless.)

By comparison Hopkins could be taken as enjoying the rhetoric a bit too much.

I am reminded of Samuel Johnson's dismissal of some minor religious poet "Penitence is not at leisure for cadence or epithets."

For those who love poetry - I suggest you look away now!



A Skipping rhyme

I am skipping! I'm skipping a 'bump'*
(*Turn the rope twice with only one jump)
And I'm trying to increase my score.
But it's hard for an oldie like me,
Though I think I'm as fit as can be,
To improve on my PB of four.

Composed - If I can use the word - while out for my weekly walk!

Here's John Betjeman in Parliament Hill Fields

Oh the after tram ride quiet, when we heard a mile beyond
Silver music from the bandstand, barking dogs by Highgate Pond;
Up the hill where stucco houses in Virginia creeper drown –
And my childish wave of pity, seeing children carrying down
Sheaves of drooping dandelions to the courts of Kentish Town.


And here's Thom Gunn in Parliament Hill Fields (in his punctuation free poem, Autobiography)

a green dry prospect
distant babble of children
and beyond, distinct at
the end of the glow
St Paul’s like a stone thimble

longing so hard to make
inclusions that the longing
has become   in memory
an inclusion


I always wondered about Thom with an H.  According to Wiki, his full name was Thomson.  It's a suprising use of the word inclusions.  I will have to think what it means.

Anyone who can write a poem called Last Days at Teddington has something in common with Betjeman

That's what he always said, but I think it's now been discovered that he was not christened 'Thomson'. He changed the spelling of Tom in his twenties I think, to reflect his mother's surname. She left his father when he and his brother were boys. The two of them found her when she killed herself a few years later. He didn't write about her until near the end of his own life, in two poems that appeared in his last published collection, Boss Cupid:


My Mother's Pride

She dramatized herself
Without thought of the dangers.
But 'Never pay attention,' she said,
'To the opinions of strangers.'

And when I stole from a counter,
'You wouldn't accept a present
From a tradesman.' But I think I might have:
I had the greed of a peasant.

She was proud of her ruthless wit
And the smallest ears in London.
'Only conceited children are shy.'
I am made by her, and undone.


The Gas-poker

Forty-eight years ago
- Can it be forty-eight
Since then? - they forced the door
Which she had barricaded
With a full bureau's weight
Lest anyone find, as they did,
What she had blocked it for.

She had blocked the doorway so,
To keep the children out.
In her red dressing-gown
She wrote notes, all night busy
Pushing the things about,
Thinking till she was dizzy,
Before she had lain down.

The children went to and fro
On the harsh winter lawn
Repeating their lament,
A burden, to each other
In the December dawn,
Elder and younger brother,
Till they knew what it meant.

Knew all there was to know.
Coming back off the grass
To the room of her release,
They who had been her treasures
Knew to turn off the gas,
Take the appropriate measures,
Telephone the police.

One image from the flow
Sticks in the stubborn mind:
A sort of backwards flute.
The poker that she held up
Breathed from the holes aligned
Into her mouth till, filled up
By its music, she was mute.


I like the double meaning of 'burden' in the second poem. (Gunn is very sensitised to the meanings of words - like the 'inclusions' that you mention.) And I love the rhyme 'London/undone' in the first poem.

Gunn said that he finally found himself able to write 'The Gas-poker' when he decided to narrate the children's discovery in the third person. I suppose, unlike the mother described in the first poem, Gunn is refusing to dramatise himself here. But it's quite clear by the final stanza that the poem is about him (his is the 'stubborn mind' in which the image sticks).

More from Yannis Ritsos:


Mager earth, very meager, burnt bushes, stones;
we loved these stones, we worked them. Time passes.
Resplendent sunsets. A cherry-glow on the windowpanes.
Behind the panes, the flower pots, unmarried girls.
Mists rise from the olive grove. When evening falls,
the processing of the veiled ones ascends behind the cypress trees;
they walk a little stiffly, with an ancient, sad pride;
it's immediately clear from the walk: their knees
are marble, broken, stuck together with cement.

November, 1967-January 1968
(wot, he worked on it for 2-3 months?!)
Translation: N.C. Germanacos

Evan, ever the radical channels Spahlinger, who said sth similar about Friedrich Hölderlin and Paul Celan. Allusions to violence for the sake of aesthetic inviolability.

 

I got tons more where that came from. Just found a book of his Collected Poems at Walden Pond books in Oakland, CA. Everything from 10-20pp poems from the perspectives of Greek/Trojan mythical figures ("Helen" is a favorite of mine, but I haven't read all) to briefer outcroppings such as the ones just cited.

... and of course was WRONG.