Nature Poetry Part 1: The Windhover, Gerard Manley Hopkins

For many years I firmly believed that nature poetry was completely lame.  Why did I think this? I was of the view that nature best expressed itself, and that nature poetry was little more than a pale, boring reflection of reality.  Also, I've never got into Wordsworth, who I strongly associated with nature poetry. Then I revisited this poem in a book of children's verse which I had owned for years.  I had been reading Gerard Manley Hopkins' super-bleak sonnets (worth another post), and found this much more uplifting verse (which incidentally I don't think was written specifically for children).

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,	5
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	10
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.

[Note: Apparent Hopkins invented the word sillion, which means: The thick, voluminous, and shiny soil turned over by a plow.]
 
This poem is full of unbridled enthusiasm for the beauty of nature, and describes both the bird in flight and the viewer's response to it.  The rhythm of the poem slows and quickens, like a bird riding the currents of air - rising and falling.

Hopkins was a master of meter. He 'discovered' a type of meter which he called sprung rhythm.  This basically is a form of meter where the number of accented syllables in a line are counted, but the number of unaccented syllables are not.  So, a foot will have one accented syllable, but could have any number of unaccented syllables.  A paeonic foot ordinarily would have one stressed syllable followed by three unstressed, and Hopkins identified this poem as containing paeonic feet, as well as 'outriding' feet - unstressed syllables not counted in scansion. 

It is this uneveness of the rhythm due to the use of unstressed syllables which creates the effect of slowing and quickening, and rhythmically reflects the movement of a bird in the sky. While I think that scanning Hopkins poems is great fun, the complexity of his rhythms makes it too large a task for a blog post.  For example, Hopkins typically stuck to the right number of feet per line.  Theoretically this means that this poem should scan five stressed syllables to a line.  However, in my view line 2 is extremely difficult to scan with only five stressed syllables, and I end up with seven.

The overall point is that the use of irregular rhythm was intended to sound more like natural speech, and Hopkins is seen by some as just giving a fancy name to free verse.  But he clearly still considered he was writing more formal poetry.  This poem is a petrarchan sonnet - fourteen lines divided into an octave and a sestet.  Typically the rhyming rules are not particularly strict for the sestet.  Hopkins rhymes all the lines in the octave, whereas a more typical rhyme scheme would be abba abba.

He also uses other poetic techniques like repetition and alliteration - "I saw this morning morning's minion"; "dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon", "rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing".
 
So, why is this poem not lame?  In my view there a three main reasons.  First, the link between the form of the poem and what it seeks to described, conjuring the image of the falcon through both description and sound.  Second, the bending of language to seek to describe the extraordinary - a normal form of words will not suffice so instead he makes a compound adjective: dapple-dawn-drawn. Third, because it seeks not only to describe but responds - "My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird".

This latter line is so small, and yet so big - "My heart in hiding" conjures a retreat from the world, a sad heart which the bird calls out for a moment. Hopkins was a priest, and his nature poetry is also linked to a love of God in nature - the bird stirring his heart is perhaps also an image of God speaking to the unquiet or doubting spirit.

And how impassioned is the description? The excess of adjectives and emotion - "the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion/Times lovelier, more dangerous'. Nature here is dangerous and volatile - out of our control.

So, this poem converted me back to nature poetry, because I saw that nature poetry is not so much about description, but our relationship to nature and the world.  Poems where nature is just a metaphor are, I think, a little different.  Perhaps some more on that another day.

Bright Star - John Keats

This is the first of (hopefully) many posts on particular poems.  This is a sonnet by the romantic poet John Keats. You may know the poem from the recent (and excellent) film about his romance with Fanny Brawne - Bright Star.  IMDB says 7/10, but I say 8.5/10. I am talking about this poem on request - this goes out to you TC. Remember, these posts are just my interpretation of the poems - if you have different ideas, let me know.

Anyway, onto the poetry.  This is a love poem. It is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, rhyming abad, cdcd, efef, gg.  Sonnets make a good form for a love poem, because the tight line limit, rhyme scheme and meter are a good vehicle for lyrical verse based on strong images or metaphors without much of a narrative.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art---
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors---
No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.

The poem is essentially divided into two parts.  The first 8 lines, or the first two quatrains, are all about the star, and how 'stedfast' the star is. They conjure the (seemingly) eternal presence of the star in the sky. There is strong religious symbolism - an eremite is a Christian hermit or recluse, and as such the star's observation of the earth is portrayed as an act of solitary worship. The 'moving waters' are also described as 'priestlike', which conjures up nice images of waves crashing on the shores.

Then the last six lines - the third quatrain and the final rhyming couplet - focus in on the lover, who wishes to be like the star but rather than worshipping the Earth, worship his love - 'yet still stedfast, still unchangeable/pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast'.  This beautifully links the eternity of the star with a short time between lovers - him resting upon her breast hearing her breathe - 'awake forever in a sweet unrest'. Such 'turns' are common in sonnets and are referred to as 'voltas' - they mark a shift of ideas in the poem.

The final rhyming couplet - always a key element of any sonnet - speaks of life and death. He wishes to 'live ever' listening to her 'tender-taken breath', 'or else swoon in death'. Here once again we can observe the interaction between the moment and eternity - if he continues to love her he will live eternally, stedfast like the star. If he ceases to hear her breath - ceases to love - he will die. Interestingly, this last line could almost be the volta in the poem - as the love seems to for the first time to question whether the moment, love, will last forever, and what the alternative would be.

I spent quite a lot of time talking about meter in my last post. In this poem you can observe how the irregular use of meter can serve to emphasise particular images or words. Most of the lines are written in iambic pentameter, but some of the feet are irregular.  For example, the first foot is a spondee - two stressed syllables (as opposed to an iamb which is an unstressed followed by a stressed).  The spondee serves to emphasise the star, but also contributes to the prayer-like nature of the sonnet - it adds solemnity to the appeal to the star for stedfastness in love.  In the same way the 'Still, still' in the 13th line emphasises the word still, which here seems to have the double meaning of unmoving and continuing. He wishes to be like the star in his devotion to his love, and to continue to love her, to continue to be with her as he is in the moment.

The last line is also interesting, because the meter seems a little irregular - you can form an iamb between the last syllable of 'ever' and 'or', but that means a foot is split by the dash. 'Live' also seems like it should be stressed, and 'or else' could both be unstressed. It can be hard to tell sometimes exactly where the emphasis falls in a line, but this sense of irregularity links to the uncertainty of this line - uncertainty about the narrator's own constancy in love, the possibility of being stedfast like the star.

What is poetry, Part 2: The formal elements of poetry

It is helpful, when discussing poetry, to be armed with a certain knowledge of the formal elements of poetry. I am going to briefly discuss the key formal elements in this post, in order to provide a framework for exciting future posts on the sonnet, the ballad and free verse. The formal stuff in abstract is kind of boring, but it becomes more interesting when applied to particular poems. This post aims to give a basic guide which provides a jumping off point for looking at particular poems or poetic forms.

The building block of a lot of poetry is the number and structure of lines.  Some poetic forms have a set number of lines - for example a sonnet has fourteen lines. A line of poetry was traditionally referred to as a 'verse'. Line is easier to understand these days. A 'stanza' is a unit of lines within a poem, set out from other stanzas by a space. Often traditional poetry would have a set number of lines in a stanza.

In the last post I talked about rhyme, which is the formal element most people associate with poetry. Different poetic forms traditionally have different rhyme schemes.  A 'Shakespearian sonnet' for example rhymes abab cdcd efef gg - ie, the first and third lines rhyme, the second and fourth and so on.  The final two lines are a rhyming couplet. Normally in a traditional ballad the poem is divided into stanzas of four lines, with the second and fourth lines rhyming.

The third formal element of poetry is meter. While we can talk is a general way about the rhythm of poetry, meter means a specific rhythm. To determine the meter of a poem, each line is divided into feet composed of a number of syllables, stressed and unstressed. Feet have different names depending on the number of syllables and the stress placed on them. Often the symbol '¯' is used for stressed syllables and '˘' for unstressed. Wikipedia has more information here. One of the most common feet is the iamb - one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable:  ˘ ¯.  The meter of the poem is determine by the kind of feet used and the number of feet in a line. Iambic pentameter, for example, means there are five iambs in a line.

Other formal elements are a bit more straightforward and less technical.  Repetition, both informal and formal - ie a set pattern of repetition in a poem - is one important element frequently used in poetry. Imagery, in particular metaphor and simile, is a vital element of many poems.

So, and short example by William Blake (1757-1827)

The Sick Rose

O Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,




Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

This poem does not use a strict meter - the feet vary in each line.  For example, the first line has an iamb (˘ ¯) followed by an anapest (˘ ˘ ¯). The second line has two anapests, the third an iamb and an anapest, and the fourth an anapest followed by an iamb.  Importantly, however, all the lines have two stressed syllables.  

The short two-beat line gives the poem a quick rhythm which accentuates the ominous tones in the poem's imagery.  The two short stanzas rhyming abcb defe is a simple structure reminiscent of a song or a nursery rhyme.

The rose is traditionally a symbol of love in poetry, and 'thy bed/of crimson joy' seems to refer to the sexual expression of love - bed, crimson and joy combining to create the image.  The 'invisible worm' - the destroyer of life - is a metaphor for the invisible forces which create a sense of shame about the sexual expression of love. Thus shame and love become intertwined - destroying love and life.

This poem is very simple, but the rhyme and meter, and the strong imagery really make it stick in your head. If you want to read more of Blake, start with Songs of Innocence and Experience. He was a really interesting character, and an amazing visual artist as well - I will have to do a full post on him one day.