HURRAHING IN HARVEST

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings for him bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

The miracle of this poem is the way it creates an intense kinaesthetic, almost actually kinetic sensation of physical participation in what’s being described. Even though a still picture might render the visual aspects of the visual scene more vividly and precisely, they’d remain external to the viewer. In contrast, reading the poem you not only become Hopkins in the swaying, surging excitement of his response but become the things he sees, the stooks, the clouds, the hills, even the world-wielding shoulder of their creator. So much is in tiny touches of articulation – like the way the parallel rhythms of ‘arise’ and ‘around’, emphasized by the line end pause, instantly evoke an impression of how the stooks are lined up in ranks of the same shape. In lines three and four, the wilful-wavy lines of the cloud almost draw themselves in the air, fading away with the disappearance of the /m/ alliteration at the end of the line. The whole poem is a triumph of the phonetic and syntactical imagination that makes most other poetry seem phonetically and syntactically inert by contrast. And the biggest, most indescribable wonder is the way the whole poem seems to flow and unfold as a single, line and stanza punctuated, constantly changing yet completely integrated impulse, perfectly shaped to complete itself emotionally and artistically in the final line.