In his biography, it says that he started writing poems in 1868 and then he had a 7 year writers block. In 1875 he started writing in a new style, he was studying to become a priest and 5 nuns had died in a shipwreck. It also says that his later poetry was a mix of religious and sexual imagery that was supposed to express his love and meager poetic productions. It seems like he struggled to find the balance between God and other things in his life.
The Windhover talks of a darling French heir and there is a significant number of alliterations. Windhover implies a bird, because birds hover in the wind and well, the footnote says it is a Kestrl falcon. In this case the bird is a falcon and it talks of the pleasure one gets from watching one soar gracefully. "Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume" Falcons can be dangerous and majestic at the same time. However, the subtitle of the poem is To Christ Our Lord, which is implying that maybe instead of it being a falcon, Hopkins could be talking about Jesus.
I think that Hopkins' poem Spring and Fall: to a young child is about the joy and sadness a child gets from the changing of the seasons. However, I also think that this is a waste of space. Yes, he is trying to express the emotion people feel but its not very detailed. "As the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder" as we grow up we don't find the same joy in life that little kids have. We might see bubbles now and think that they are boring or maybe a little bit reminiscent. But when you watch little kids play with bubbles, its hilarious because they act as though they have never seen anything as beautiful.
In conclusion, I'm not sure if I agree with Gerard Manley Hopkins being in this book with poets like Keats, Tennyson, and T.S. Eliot. His poems seem to be lacking in detail and about topics that are cute but not exactly up to par with what the others have brought to the table.
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1 comment:
Jennifer,
It is a good idea to provide a context for your analysis of poems, such as by giving details on a poet's life experiences. It is important, though, to draw a connection between the factoids you mention and the poems you analyze, or else the bio notes can seem like mere filler. It is not fully clear in this post what the connection is between the three initial paragraphs, and your dismissal of Hopkins (admittedly a very challenging poet) therefore seems a bit unsupported.
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