The Windhover

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

                                To Christ our Lord

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.


~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Edit:
I meant to add this link to an essay on The Windhover. Very helpful to me as I’m learning poetry, and learning how to talk about it with my children.

Pied Beauty

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
                For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
                And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
                With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                                                                                Praise him.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Some of our dappled things — a new batch of mail-order chicks that arrived Tuesday afternoon:



Most of these are layers, Silver-Spangled Hamburgs (the striped ones with the grey heads), and Blue Andalusians (the black/grey/cream and the grey/cream ones). The golden ones are Buff Orpingtons, a dual-purpose breed which we bought as a “straight run” meaning that we didn’t order a particular sex, they just gave them to us as they hatched out. Statistically this means that they should be half male (which will mostly be butchered) and half female (which we’ll keep for layers). The light yellow ones are a straight run batch of Jumbo X Rocks, a heavy meat bird.

This little chickie is my favorite:



(pictures taken Wednesday)

The Postmodern

~ D. A. Carson

At last we know all truth is gray: no more
Faith’s raucous rhetoric, this blinding trap
Of absolutes, this brightly colored map
Of good and bad: our ocean has no shore.
Dogmatic truth is chimera: deplore
All arrogance: the massive gray will sap
The sparkling hues of bigotry, and cap
The rainbow, mask the sun, make dullness soar.

            Yet tiny, fleeting hesitations lurk
            Behind the storied billows of the cloud
            Like sparkling, prism’d glory in the murk:
            The freedom of the gray becomes a shroud.

Where nothing can be false, truth must away-
Not least the truth that all my world is gray.

Copyright (c) 1999 First Things (May 1999)

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

HT: Carmon

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I like the way Carson contrasts the grey of postmodernity, not with the black and white of modernity, but with the many colors our Trinitarian God actually used in the creation.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

More spring color here — pinkbuds and violets:

The great Gaels of Ireland

from Ballad of the White Horse, by G.K. Chesterton

[Alfred is gathering the chiefs for war and comes to Colan of Caerleon]

Last of a race in ruin–
    He spoke the speech of the Gaels;
His kin were in holy Ireland,
    Or up in the crags of Wales.

But his soul stood with his mother’s folk,
    That were of the rain-wrapped isle,
Where Patrick and Brandan westerly
Looked out at last on a landless sea
    And the sun’s last smile.

His harp was carved and cunning,
    As the Celtic craftsman makes,
Graven all over with twisting shapes
    Like many headless snakes.

His harp was carved and cunning,
    His sword prompt and sharp,
And he was gay when he held the sword,
    Sad when he held the harp.

For the great Gaels of Ireland
    Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
    And all their songs are sad.

Agrarian children at play

Yesterday being a wet dreary day, my two youngest (7yos & 5yod) were engaging in a bit of imaginative play with two bags of dried beans. Each bag represented a chicken, the male and his female. The conversation between these two wandered over various topics, but eventually the hen made an astonishing annoucement regarding her future offspring.

Hen: “I have a hundred and twenty eggs.

Rooster: “A hundred and twenty? How’d you do that?

Hen: “Ya mate me too long!”

I dunno people. I grew up in the city. Should I be concerned about this?

The Way of the Cross

from The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

[King Alfred, discouraged in trying to rid his land of the heathen invaders, has a vision of the Virgin Mary and asks her whether he will ever succeed.]

“Mother of God,” the wanderer said,
    “I am but a common king,
Nor will I ask what saints may ask,
    To see a secret thing.

“The gates of heaven are fearful gates
    Worse than the gates of hell;
Not I would break the splendours barred
Or seek to know the thing they guard,
    Which is too good to tell.

“But for this earth most pitiful,
    This little land I know,
If that which is for ever is,
Or if our hearts shall break with bliss,
    Seeing the stranger go?

“When our last bow is broken, Queen,
    And our last javelin cast,
Under some sad, green evening sky,
Holding a ruined cross on high,
Under warm westland grass to lie,
    Shall we come home at last?”

And a voice came human but high up,
    Like a cottage climbed among
The clouds; or a serf of hut and croft
That sits by his hovel fire as oft,
But hears on his old bare roof aloft
    A belfry burst in song.

“The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
    We do not guard our gain,
The heaviest hind may easily
Come silently and suddenly
    Upon me in a lane.

[…]

“The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
    We do not guard our gold,
Men may uproot where worlds begin,
Or read the name of the nameless sin;
But if he fail or if he win
    To no good man is told.

“The men of the East may spell the stars,
    And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
    Go gaily in the dark.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I love that image of the godly man setting his face like a flint to do what is right because it is Right, and not because he’s sure of success. May we ever “go gaily in the dark.”

a thrown a

~ E.E. Cummings *

a thrown a

-way It
with some-
thing sil
-very

;bright,&mys(

a thrown a-
way
X
-mas)ter-

i

-ous wisp A of glo-
ry.pr
-ettily
cl(tr)in(ee)gi-
ng

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Okay, I love Cummings’ fun poems like yesterday’s and “anyone lived in a pretty how town” but when I see things like this I usually wonder what went wrong in the poet’s childhood. So I was very happy when earlier this year Ben posted a link to Remy’s explanation of this purely visual poem — and it’s very good. You should go read it. Unless, of course, you’re the sort of person who understands this kind of thing intuitively.
:-p

P.S.
I’ve only seen this online so I don’t know if it’s really supposed to be centered the way I have, but I think it looks better that way, and it is a chiasm, after all.

i thank you God for most this amazing

~ E.E. Cummings *

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

~ A.E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Sonnet LXXIII

~ William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
                This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
                To love that well which thou must leave ere long.