Today's poem

One frame is alive - a kite flies, circles calmly in the pale sky, often over stupas or temples around Enoshima, Japan (I tend to understand a poem visually as reading haiku. It might relate to photography?). On the other hand, Hopkins' sonnet in the Victorian era is more musical. A nasal consonant 'n' in the fourth line has effective resonance. Repetitive sprung rhythm makes the poem powerful. In the sestet, getting radiant, eloquent. Spiritual ecstasy in the last line, like Blake's poems - the unity of bird and something with divinity. Noted that I am an agnostic.


The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins
  To Christ our Lord
(from Poetry Foundation)

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.