The organ loft at St. Paul’s Covent Garden, London. Photo CC BY-SA-NC Gardner Campbell
Today I wanted to do something special for Easter. Why not a podcast then? And for this podcast, I return to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet I read for the first time in the fall of 1977. It was love at first reading. Forty-four years later, my enthusiasm for his work is undimmed. As with all great work, the longer you read it, the deeper it becomes.
Hopkins wrote a great Easter poem called “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.” He called it a “sonnet with two codas.” (A later critic helpfully points out it has three codas.) As he did with several of his poems, especially as he became more interested in the musical quality of spoken verse, Hopkins marked particular stresses in the poem where one might not ordinarily place them when reading (the “This” of “This Jack” is a good example). He also marked what he called “outrides” (syllables to be hurried along) and “ties” (syllables to be linked together across consonants and vowels in one long arc). The marks are reproduced in the notes of the edition I’m working from, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (4th ed., revised and enlarged), edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie.
I have tried to convey Hopkins’ markings in my reading. My American accent works against, me, of course, but I have done the best I could. This was about the 10th attempt, I guess, and each time I found more things to attend to, more textures to try to realize in my voice. Then I had to try to remember them all in each successive reading. I ended up with what you’ll hear below. Whether or not I nailed this take, I do hope I have managed to communicate the wondering, oneiric beginning, the middle section of elegy and anger, and the conclusion of renewed resolve and, then, a kind of astonished peace.
I reproduce the poem below, with a recording of my reading beneath it. The vertical lines indicate caesurae, that is, deliberate pauses in the middle of each line.
Happy Easter.