Poem of the week – The Starlight Night by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Every week the Reaction team will present a poem for the delectation of its subscribers. There are no thematic or stylistic guidelines to the poems chosen. Variety is the only editorial consideration. We hope you enjoy this new feature.
Gerard Manley Hopkins converted to Catholicism while at Oxford University in 1866. His new faith deterred him from promoting his poetic talent and at the time of his death in 1889, not even six people knew he wrote poetry.
One of the few who did was his close chum at Oxford, the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges. After Hopkins’s death, Bridges collected and published his friend’s prodigious poetry. Those poems revealed a mighty inner stature to the world which in life had been cautiously concealed by a stolid and pious appearance. The unique expressions Hopkins used influenced the likes of TS Eliot and have added an extra dimension to the technical, abstract and aesthetic possibilities of the English language.
This quiet and unassuming man has posthumously been recognised as a poetic visionary and master craftsman. In the poem below, the reader will see the enlivening effect of Sprung Rhythm (a method he formalised and cultivated) and the satisfaction of ongoing alliteration, idiosyncrasies which play out in his wider corpus. The Starlight Night starts with Hopkins asking the reader to gaze up at a dark sky to regard the stars. Its final line is spent projecting an image of Christ on to the radiant glory of golden stars. Enjoy our Poem of the Week.
The Starlight Night by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.