The Starlight Night
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, aims, 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.
So what does the poem mean?
What means this bizarre
double-jointed curvature, this sharp hairpin turn from fireworks
"ooooooohs" and "ahhhhhhhhs" into the kind of heavy and
even suffocating religiosity that leaves me completely kerflummoxed?
I don't know much about Gerard
Manley Hopkins except to say that when he became a Jesuit, he burned every poem
he had ever written. Thus perhaps some of his best works were relegated to the
ashcan.
He's the one who wrote about
depression, that Carrion Comfort one that I find so harrowing, to the point
that I think he must have been a true sufferer. But why must everything in Hopkins
be Christified?
The poem starts off very much like
an innocent Robert Louis Stevenson verse for children, a "how would you
like to go up in a swing" sort of thing. But there is a sort of urgency to
it, as if we'd better look now or we'll be too late. It seems to tug and poke
at us, hey, take a look up there, look at Casseopeia (which I can NEVER see - I
am the poorest of visual discerners and can't tell one bloody constellation
from another). Then comes a flood of almost-precious elven description right
out of Lord of the Rings. Cockle-shells and dingle-bells. Except that, because
it's Hopkins , he can get away with
it. It's a surprising, even shocking quality, the art of verbal daring.
Fire-folk sitting in the air, why
yes, that's a line any poet would kill for. Quickgold: that's perfect, isn't it
- why didn't anyone think of that before? The air swirls with magic, you can
see your breath, you're shivering yet too warm, your companion's hand is like
ice in yours. Yes, you're there, transported, borne up like a downy feather
(take THAT, Gerard!) as the constellations wheel drunkenly over your head.
Where I go off-course is in the
line, "Ah well! It is all a purchase, all is a prize." What can he be
getting at? Taken literally, it makes no sense at all. Purchase what? Prize
what? Does he mean we have to earn the right to get into heaven, so to speak -
heaven represented by the rapturous star-filled night? Is immortality a kind of
lottery, a spiritual 6-49?
Buy then! bid
then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.
I don't know if he's talking about
"buying your way in", trying to bribe God (good luck!), or the
cheapness and crassness of reality compared to the gasping celestial vision.
It's one of those weirdball Hopkins-ian things that makes you want to toss the
book across the room.
But then he gets back to the
"look, look" stuff, which by now is getting a little old (can't help
but think it!) in spite of the "Maymess" (a word I really thought *I*
had invented) and the "mealed-with-yellow sallows".
But then come the strangest lines
of all.
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.
I don't know, this grounds the poem
with a thud, steals all its magic. Hopkins
must have had some sort of a thing for Christ, and it's weird. When I first
read this startling thing, my reaction was "what"? These are indeed
the - barn? And what are "the shocks"? Kindly explain yourself, poet.
I can only guess - and I am really
guessing here, because this is an odd thing that doesn't make much sense even
after a lot of analysis - that he thinks of the heavens/nature and all that
jazz as "housing" Jesus and Mary and all those holy folk who to him
represent God. Or does he glimpse the holy/eternal in and through, are those
starfolk sitting in the air little glints of God, God's little birthday candles
maybe?
Is the universe just God's skin?
I might be reading more into this
than I should. Hey, maybe I'm smarter than he was, or at least less obscure.
But there are things I don't like here, words that may or may not be used for
jarring effect: "barn" (barn? Haven't we just travelled to the
farthest reaches of the universe? Why use the image of an outbuilding that is
basically full of shit?); "shuts" (an awful word, implying
"shut-in" and even "shut up!); "spouse", a sort of
creaky word referring to one's life partner - oh, that's creepy! Oh, that's
creepy! Is he married to Jesus, or his mother? I guess "espouse" can
mean just believing in something. Or something.
Or surrendering to it? Oh God. I
was never one for surrender, though in certain circles (does the term 12 Step
Program mean anything to you?) it's considered the highest achievement.
And that word "hallows"
is not one I am comfortable with either - all hallows eve, hallowed be thy name
(which for some reason always reminded me of the inside of a pumpkin, that
punky smell). So he throws in some language which could not be more at odds
with the dazzling fluidity of those first few lines. What of buying, selling,
bidding - what's he on about? Maybe it would be better to stop at Line 7. Can
the Sunday school lesson; just dazzle us.
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
