Poetry Editor Ira Maine is back in top form.
Some time ago, whilst discussing the idea of Elysium in literature, and how poetry in particular strives towards the condition of music, I used a quote from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem to illustrate my point. I couldn’t find the required poem so I relied on my memory. I began with;
‘I have desired to go
Where falls no hail or rain or any snow,
Nor even the wind blows loudly,
I remembered this as a Hopkins poem where he expresses his weariness with the world and his desire, his wish to sling his hook and be united in Heaven with God. (Hopkins was a 19th Cent. English Jesuit priest)
Well, I got the first line right! Pure Gerard Manley Hopkins, and absolutely right. It is indeed the first line of a poem called Heaven-Haven, but I got everything else hopelessly wrong!
To begin with there is a secondary title to this poem. Hopkins is not trying to express what he feels, but what a young girl, renouncing the world in favour of the veil might feel on joining an order of nuns. The additional, explanatory title is: ‘a nun takes the veil.’
Here is this short poem:
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp or sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
She doesn’t want or need the cares of either the land or the sea. She wants the contemplative life and to share her life with God.
There is nothing complicated about this poem. It is brief and easy to remember.
And this inevitably brings to mind the incomparable Dylan Thomas, with
his poem “Fern Hill which ends with the lines’;
“…Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea…’
sounding so like Hopkins it would take your breath away. But then Thomas takes Hopkins cadence and rhythm and turns it into something wholly original and new, as do both Tennyson and Bob Dylan.
And now my head, cracked like Lear’s, wanders off in the direction of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, of all people. Right in the middle of his Morte D’Arthur, (the death of Arthur) the dying Arthur says:
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new…’ and immediately you can see here where the young Bob Dylan got his ideas from.
Where Tennyson got his ideas is on show here too, a few lines later when Arthur asks:
‘…Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of…’
Which is a much more blatant bit of badly disguised plagiarism than Dylan’s trifle.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet to his mate Horatio:
‘>>>There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy…’
And on we go to Arthur’s farewell,(which lasts a fair while) where he tells us he is off
‘…to the island-valley of Avilion; [Wait for it!]
(Where falls not hail,or rain, or any snow,
Nor even the wind blows loudly); but it lies
Deep meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows, crown’d with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound…’
And here you can see where my memory dredged two of Tennyson’s lines from, whacked them together with a Hopkins line and convinced me I was perfectly correct.
Oh Morte D’Arthur is terrific stuff altogether, full of knights and daze and Merlin and endless magic, and I had no right at all (at all) to confuse these two poems.
Until the next time, do accept my apologies for this unseemly error.
I must be less casual, I must be less casual…I must be…