So, I started this Tumblr about a year ago, but then I kind of forgot about it. I'm just now posting for the first time. I have another blog here, but I haven't posted to that one in a while, either. Truth is, I haven't found my own life, or my own thoughts, all that interesting lately. But now I'm trying to claw my way back from oblivion. For me, that means blathering about literary and mystical things. I hope to blather in a mildly engaging way, dear reader.
The title for this is taken from one of my favorite poems, "God's Grandeur," by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I think that every poet has a handful of favorite poets who serve as symbols of Poetry Itself. That is, when a poet thinks about why he or she writes poetry, he or she thinks of these favorites. I sometimes lose my poetry faith. As I said to a friend recently, I often feel like poetry is an abusive spouse; I know poetry doesn't love me and will hurt me again, but I stay because I am too old to find anyone better. However, sooner or later I think of one of my favorites, such as Hopkins, and I remember why I joined this strange, quixotic community. Hopkins's work comes very close to perfectly epitomizing what I love about poetry: its power to delve into the luminous true nature of Being, to uncover what he calls "the dearest freshness deep down things." I read a line like that, and it heals me a little. It resurrects.
(Of course, I like some more recent stuff, too. It's just that Hopkins's sense of his, and poetry's, mission is closer to my own than that of most contemporary poets. More on that another time, so to speak.)
I hope to post on at least a semi-frequent basis. If anyone is out there, here is something lovely to start you off with: the full text of the above-mentioned poem. Enjoy.
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.
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