Poetry in Context: “Spring”

Posted on by M.E. Bond Posted in PoetryTagged , , ,

I see that I did not write any posts on “Poetry in Context” in 2021. I think I can do better in 2022! We’ll start with a sonnet by British poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).

The Poem

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.      

The Manuscript   

A handwritten manuscript of “Spring” dated May 1877 is found in the Gerard Manley Hopkins Collection in the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

Commentary

The Encyclopedia Britannica gives some commentary on Hopkins’ style that might be helpful: “His exploitation of the verbal subtleties and music of English, of the use of echo, alliteration, and repetition, and a highly compressed syntax were all in the interest of projecting deep personal experiences, including his sense of God’s mystery, grandeur, and mercy… He called the energizing prosodic element of his verse “sprung rhythm,” in which each foot may consist of one stressed syllable and any number of unstressed syllables, instead of the regular number of syllables used in traditional metre. The result is a muscular verse, flexible, intense, vibrant, and organic, that combines accuracy of observation, imaginative daring, deep feeling, and intellectual depth.”

I must admit that the meaning of the last six lines still eludes me. I did learn a few interesting things about the context of the poem from Catherine Phillip’s article ““Nothing is so beautiful”: Hopkins’s Spring.”

She writes that “Hopkins was a child of the Romantic period, not of 18th-century Italianate formal perfection and “Spring” celebrates the luxuriance of weeds, the natural plants that lined the paths and roadsides he loved to ramble along. He also saw closer connections between this natural world and Eden than in man’s manipulating of plant breeds.” (This reminds me of his poem “Pied Beauty,” which I encountered in high school.)

Phillips also explains the history of celebrating the Virgin Mary in the month of May, which I did not know about. “Across Medieval Europe there were on May Day (May 1st) fertility festivities crowning a Queen of the May. According to Marina Warner, it was the Society of Jesus that did much to redirect May festivals towards the Virgin Mary. Associating Mary with May became more popular in European countries in the 18th century and, in the 19th, devotion to Mary, backed by the Vatican, increased markedly… It was in the 19th century that celebrating May as Mary’s month seems to have become accepted in England.”

Conclusion

“Spring” could definitely take more pondering. For now, I am going to pull my little book of Gerard Manley Hopkins poems off my shelf. There is something compelling in his style, which I think I will enjoy in small doses!

Sources

Any poem or poet you would like to see me cover?

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