Seeking the Word at Work in All Things

by guest author, Mary Graham.

According to poet David Whyte, poetry is language against which we have no defenses – it speaks directly to our vulnerability. Poetry can dissolve the isolating walls preventing us from feeling connected to everything. Mary Oliver describes a poem as a door into a temple that allows us, when we walk in, to feel less just ourselves [alone], more a part of everything. That’s why it moves us: we are finally no longer isolated – we feel healed by this experience of feeling connected, or, and I love this phrase – ‘in touch.’ Although it’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly we are in touch with (or who is touching us?) it seems that experience of healing and the accompanying relief, even delight or joy, is universal.

“…a poem [is] a door into a temple that allows us, when we walk in, to feel less just ourselves [alone], more part of everything.”

The author of this piece, Mary Graham

Of course there are so many aspects of poetry and poetic language that can move us, but today I want to focus on a couple aspects of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ legacy. He was such a maverick, so ahead of his time with his poetry, and at the same time, so humble – he had no ambition to be known as a poet, yet his influence and renown as such are tremendous. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest in the 1800s. He was a Jesuit scholar, teacher, and linguist who never published himself as a poet – in fact, there’s a story that he burned all his poems upon entering priesthood. He was a highly experimental poet in an age when poetry was extremely structured, and his playing with language was one of the ways he practiced seeking the divine – he wrote sonnets about God, even to God, which no one else was doing at the time. He only became famous worldwide because his friends had his poems published posthumously, and then because American poets began praising his free and creative language use – they used his work as an important touchstone for a movement in the 1930s that aimed to liberate poetry from the confines of meter and structure.

The first aspect I want to look at is Hopkins’ mastery of alliteration and its siblings, consonance and assonance. This technique of repeating or combining similar sounds is all around us – in sports teams, Los Angeles Lakers, Seattle Seahawks, as well as in commercial chains like Dunkin Donuts, Coca-Cola, Bed Bath & Beyond, etc. What does it do for us? For one, it’s a mnemonic device that helps with remembering, but above all, it’s playful, it brings a smile – it’s a way of being creative with our language. I think we have all had fun with tongue twisters at some point! What I love about alliteration is how the repetition of certain sounds opens out our hearing so that we are no longer stuck in an intellectual mode of listening and hearing; I find with very alliterative poetry, I stop registering just the meaning of the words and get transported to a more visceral experience of the sounds themselves; I begin sensing what the phonemes themselves speak to my heart. Like when you hear the phrase, ‘diving down into deep, dark, depths of dungeons’ you realize that the sound ‘d’ has a deep, downward gesture. When you pay attention, you realize you’re using most of your torso for this one little phoneme: the muscles you use to make the sound ‘d’ are actually quite deep down in your body! This is an indication that each sound has a gesture that reverberates in us on many levels.

A well-known poem of Hopkins, God’s Grandeur, contains the most beautiful, warm phrase about the spirit brooding over the earth, evoking an image of us humans as the chicks in the grandest nest that ever existed. Listen to – and enjoy – the mix of b’s and w’s, which are such comforting sounds: ‘the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.’ Deepening your attention like this, devoting yourself to the sounds themselves, to their gestures, you begin to sense the life inherent in phonemes, and more so the original power of combining sounds, of speaking words. The way we use language in our ordinary lives is often missing the sense of language’s inherent movement and power. Alliteration, assonance and consonance all open the doorway into this inherent (but sometimes hidden) life, this magic, by waking up our ears to what lives inside the sounds themselves.

I first fell in love with Hopkins’ poem Pied Beauty for the language alone, before I even understood what it was saying. It is an ode to the kind of beauty that consists of contrasts, but if you don’t know the poem well yet, I’d suggest using some open listening so as not to grasp first and foremost at the potential meaning, but rather to enjoy the way he enlivens the language by repeating the vowels and consonants.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

Hopkins was continuously seeking Christ throughout his life, and, being a lover of language, one of the ways he did so was through stretching English creatively, playing with the sounds and images and rhythm so that the language is in movement, bubbling and alive, as if searching for the truest expression. Just as this act of enlivening the language itself constituted a searching for the divine, he allows us in turn a glimpse of it, when we feel into the truth of certain inventive phrases like ‘fathers-forth’.

Inasmuch as this first aspect of his poetry calls forth a heightened listening, the second aspect of his poetry I want to highlight has to do with the sense of sight. His poems are awesome amalgamations of sounds but they are also very often about seeing, particularly seeing the divine in everything. In the poem Pied Beauty, for instance, he sees the divine certainly not just in nature, but also in the manmade artifacts – all the tackle and trim of the trades, and not only in the good and beautiful but also in the darker side of life – all things counter, spare, strange… Hopkins aimed to experience the deep individuality and distinctiveness of whatever he was looking at through an energetic, focused attention. What arises out of that attention is a new level of seeing whereby the sense of separation falls away and we feel connected to what we are perceiving, ‘part of everything’. He was interested in seeing how God lived and ‘played’ through beings and things; as we see in another of his best-loved poems, he invents the word ‘selve’ to refer to how we express our individuality, and says it’s what we live for:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

Actually, this is an excerpt from my favorite of Hopkins’ poems, also one that I loved for its sounds long before I started wanting to understand what it meant. It’s called As kingfishers catch fire, where you already hear that delicious k-f-k-f alliteration, King Fishers Catch Fire…

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

This poem expresses Hopkins’ theology – his view that in humans, this expression of one’s essence, this selving, is infused with Christ force, and as such, is an expression of God. Christ is the ‘loveliness’ in each of us. Hopkins developed the concept of this individual character of each thing, this dynamic, distinctive and individualizing element that he felt was the ‘stamp of the divine’. He called it inscape – and believed we humans have the capacity to perceive the inscape, and that doing so would lead us to Christ. This is such a beautiful idea: if you look carefully enough at what makes any given being unique, if you pay loving attention to all the details that make another different than you, you end up beholding that which lives in us all!

A contemporary poet who took this practice up masterfully is Mary Oliver. Because of a traumatic childhood full of abuse, she had a hard time enjoying the company of people, and, honing her depths of attention towards her natural surroundings instead, wrote about what she observed. In her poem, Messenger, she writes, “Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” Throughout her work there are countless examples of wonder at the natural world, a wonder that arises out of careful and deep attention toward the particularities – the inscape – of what is in front of her, be it goldenrod or a garden spider. Why does she do this, why pay such fervent attention? Firstly, she implies – see her poem I happened to be standing – that our ordinary, everyday state of mind is a condition she “can’t really call being alive” compared to the experience of lending something other than herself full attention, what she later in her life began to call ‘devotion’.Secondly, inher words, from her poem The Ponds, “I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery….that the light is everything – that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.” Without using language as religious as Hopkins’ poetry, Mary Oliver followed in his legacy of seeing the stamp of the divine in all the particulars of what she is observing. She experiences this type of deep attention as what we are on earth to do. In the poem Mindful, she writes,

It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.

The appreciation of these ‘daily presentations’ is reminiscent of Hopkins seeing the beauty in all the ‘gear and tackle and trim’ and ‘all things counter, original, spare, and strange.’ Hopkins’ favorite poem of his own describes his own experience of perceiving the inscape of a kestrel, and how it stirred in him a vision of Christ – he saw the movement of the kestrel as an echo of Christ, writing that Christ is ‘a billion times lovelier and more dangerous’. In the poem he gives the kestrel all these wonderful other names: ‘windhover’, ‘morning’s minion’, ‘kingdom of daylight’s dauphin’, and ‘dapple-dawn-drawn falcon’.

This is another technique Hopkins uses in relation to his search for the divine in all things. Giving a thing or a being a new name according to its activity in the world seems to be integrally connected to the devotion of attention to its inscape. Echoing Patrick’s wisdom from last week’s intro audio for this Arts Wednesday series, one can approach a being or know its true name by knowing its activity. We can ask ourselves, what is the activity of the beings around us? It’s a wonderful creative practice that anyone can take up, and I would encourage it! Contemplating any object and then creatively giving it new names can bring us into new relationship with it, and thus with our surroundings. The practice can awaken awe, or what Mary Oliver loved to call ‘astonishment’, and gratitude in us, and thus, do wonders for our well-being. You don’t have to aim for something as magnificent as a kestrel; take for example a ring on your finger. As you contemplate it, ask yourself what does it do? In Hopkins’ words, how does it ‘selve’ – how does it show its own particular essence? And you might come up with fun new names for it such as ‘finger-flair’; ‘digit décor’; ‘promise-keeper’; ‘marriage-mirror’; ‘hand-enhancer’; ‘finger-flaunter’, etc.

There is another contemporary writer who has taken up – in Hopkins’ fashion – this practice of trying to perceive and express the inscape of beings in the natural world by using these tools of alliteration and name-giving, as well as other creative language devices. He’s not known as a poet, but rather a nature writer and English professor in England: Robert MacFarlane.

The backstory to the poetry project I want to highlight here is that in 2015 the makers of the junior English dictionary decided to cut about 50 words that they deemed irrelevant for kids, replacing them with newer words. It turned out that every single one of the words that were cut were words straight out of nature, like acorn, otter, kingfisher, bluebell, etc., while the words added were predictably all technological ones. Among the many people appalled at this decision was Robert MacFarlane, English professor at Cambridge University in England, and a well-known nature writer. MacFarlane undertook a project to write spells dedicated to 20 words from the natural world – yes, like magic spells. He engaged an artist, Jackie Morris, and together they made a book full of these magic spells, titled The Lost Words. They are meant to enchant people back into a relationship that is being threatened: the relationship between us and the natural world. In his words, the spells “try to summon back those plants and animals into the minds of children.” I find each one not only visually stunning but also aurally; that is, the use of language in my ear sounds so magical, that I feel something quickening inside me, something like delight. It does feel like magic is happening, as the words bring something of the essence of the creature or plant alive in my imagination. Here are a couple excerpts to show how he uses both tools of alliteration and new-name-giving:

Kingfisher: fire-bringer, flame-flicker, river’s quiver, ripple-calmer, water-nester, evening-angler, weather-teller, rainbringer

Or

Dandelion: Dazzle me, little sun-of-the-grass! And spin me, tiny time-machine!

Or

Heron: Eked from iron and wreaked from blue and beaked from steel: heron, statue, seeks eel

It’s not just the playfulness with the sounds, like you have here the repeated ee sound that perhaps evokes something of the heron essence – it is also of course the creativity in imagery, the use of metaphor, like the heron being a statue, the kingfisher being a weatherman, the dandelion, of course, a tiny sun. These elements of poetry enliven our imagination, quicken our minds, lift us out of whatever fixed images we were dwelling in. My experience of this magical enlivening of language is that it succeeds in bypassing my intellect and speaks directly to my imagination, the part of me that is more connected with the spirit.

The repercussions of this little project have been tremendous. I’ll just name a few examples here: musicians were inspired to make a number of the spells into songs, so there is now a cd available – and it’s truly beautiful, I highly recommend it; some volunteers undertook the project of getting the book into every single elementary school library in the UK, even in the outermost islands only reachable by boat; and a children’s hospital commissioned the artist, Jackie Morris, to paint the corridors with magical nature paintings and these word spells to delight the children and support their healing process.

I chose one to include here for its charming use of alliteration, consonance and assonance, as well as how it looks so carefully and playfully at the being of an otter that the words and movement of the language really bring across and make alive the inner being of the thing it describes; when I read it, in any case, I feel like an otter myself, that’s how powerfully the language works to dissolve the disconnect between me and the being. That perception and communication of the inscape of the being awakens in me, even as a mere reader of the poem, a greater sense of kinship, a connectedness with the world around me.

Otter

Otter enters river without falter – what a

Supple slider out of holt and into water!

This shape-shifter’s a sheer breath-taker, a

Sure heart-stopper – but you’ll only ever spot

A shadow-flutter, bubble-skein, and never

[almost never] actual otter.

This swift swimmer’s a silver-miner – with

Trout its ore it bores each black pool deep

And deeper, delves up-current steep and

Steeper, turns the water inside-out, then

Inside-outer.

Ever dreamed of being otter? That

utter underwater thunderbolter, that

shimmering twister?

Run to the riverbank, otter-dreamer, slip

Your skin and change your matter, pour

Your outer being into otter – and enter

Now as otter without falter into water.

id you hear how Hopkins’ legacy is living on through the work of MacFarlane? MacFarlane clearly devoted deep attention to the activity of otters in order to perceive their essence, then played with language to bring that essence, that lively and liquid movement, alive through language.

I’ve been highlighting a few aspects of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ legacy that bring me closer to the divine: alliterative language opens up my hearing to the life and power inherent in language, while the communication of the inscape through deep attention and new-name-giving helps me perceive my surroundings with greater wonder and gratitude. This kind of creative language use can lift us into a new kinship with the world around us. These are ways in which, as Mary Oliver said, a poem allows you to “feel less yourself than part of everything.”

This piece was written by Mary Graham.

Mary is an academic editor with a long-standing love for the creative capacity of English. She is currently living in the Netherlands with her husband and two daughters, but feels part of the worldwide community being formed by the Light in Every Thing podcast.

To learn more about what we are doing at the Seminary of The Christian Community, visit our patreon site for more content: The Light in Every Thing.

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References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins

An interview with Mary Oliver, including her reading a few of her poems: https://onbeing.org/programs/mary-oliver-listening-to-the-world/

The Lost Words, Robert MacFarlane: https://www.lostwordsdorset.org.uk/