HOW TO READ A DIFFICULT POEM
Yes, there are poets such as Mary Oliver who tell us what they mean plainly and beautifully, but there are poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins (one of my favorites) who supply us with an experience: inventive language, sounds, and structures. Lines that stay in our minds for the song and strangeness. Here is the poem As Kingfisher’s Catch Fire, lecturer helps you inhabit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C64q_Hm0haA
As Kingfishers 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.
