Hopkins, the Maestro of Consonants

Watching kingfishers catch fire with Holly Ordway

My guest this month is Holly Ordway, who recently edited and annotated a collection of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems for Word on Fire’s Ignatian Collection. We’re discussing Hopkins’s poetry, starting with “As kingfishers catch fire.”

(Image by Augustus Binu)

Leah: To begin, I’d love to ask how often and where you read poetry. I’m trying to weave more poetry into my life, both for my sake and my daughter’s, because I find it’s not coming up naturally. I miss the days when I was growing up, when my mother would read me and my brother poems when we went to bed. And now, as a grown-up, I realize I have to commit more to reading the poems I encounter aloud—I don’t subvocalize when I read, so when I read silently to myself, poems (especially Hopkins’s!) can remain a little inert for me.

How often are you reading poems for yourself? How do you encounter them?

Holly: My poetry-reading tends to grow out of my teaching, rather than my own leisure reading. It seems like a strange thing to admit in this context, but poetry isn’t a regular part of my routine the way that novels and non-fiction are. However, it’s very much my natural inclination to turn to poetry when I am trying to communicate an idea about human nature, or human experience, or the way the world is—especially so when I’m trying to share something about the Christian Faith. Poetry, at its best, does more than any other form in conveying that delicate, powerful moment of vision at the intersection between reason and imagination. 

My standards for what resonates for me, what really works as a poem, are extremely high and, I expect, rather idiosyncratic, and so I tend to be slow and cautious in looking for what I like. I particularly like anthologies that not only provide a sampler of poems, but that also provide some context and insight into the poems included. Malcolm Guite’s anthologies The Word in the Wilderness and Love, Remember are great examples of this (and not just because they include poems of my own!). Guite has introduced me to many excellent poems over the years. The historian Eleanor Parker, who has a blog called A Clerk of Oxford, has also helped me to discover or re-discover medieval poems of great beauty and meaning. 

So, I would say that I tend to encounter poems the way that I encounter people: by being introduced to them by friends! 

Leah: Reading Hopkins felt like such an expansion of what poetry can be for me. I think back in high school, we talked about consonants mostly as a tool for alliteration (which can be a little wearing!). But Hopkins is a maestro of consonants! It made me feel real pride in English as a language, rather than getting frustrated that our grab-bag of phonemes doesn’t have the fluidity or easier rhymes of a romance language. 

His poems aren’t easy for me. I’m picking “As kingfishers catch fire” for my favorite, and a passage like this draws me up short, having to check I really follow what’s happening:

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

As you annotated his work, how much do you see your work as disentangling his dense lines, and how much do you think it’s part of the poem to be brought up short and to struggle?

Holly: You’ve chosen one of my personal favorites, as well! “As kingfishers catch fire” is an absolute masterpiece of sound and meaning combined; it’s almost incredible to me how Hopkins manages to work in so much alliteration and internal rhyme in what is already a tightly structured form (a sonnet), and to have it contribute to the meaning of the poem: it’s not just decoration.

Working through poems like this to annotate them was an absolute delight. Your question is an excellent one. I think there’s certainly some “unpacking” that needs to happen, in order to appreciate his poems—and I daresay that Hopkins himself would have acknowledged that! And the more I’ve worked with the poems, the more I’ve come to think that the difficulty of the poems does bring us up short—but I would say, not so much so that we struggle, but so that we slow down and pay attention. 

One of the things I discovered in doing the annotations was that a lot of what I had long thought was Hopkins being difficult or artsy, was in fact Hopkins being extremely precise in his word choice. (The complete Oxford English Dictionary was my close friend in this project!) He uses dialect words from Wales, where he did his novitiate, for instance. He often gives descriptions of plants and birds and landscapes that use unfamiliar words that—when I looked them up in the OED—turned out to be exactly the right words for what he was describing. (This is completely in line with his theological vision of capturing the “inscape,” or essence, of things.) 

We modern people tend to be unobservant and hasty, and lack the vocabulary to talk about the nuances of what we observe (I accuse myself here as well!). For instance, the disappearance of nature-words from the children’s Oxford Dictionary was the impetus for the brilliant book The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris - a truly Hopkins-esque endeavor. 

So, part of my work here with annotating Hopkins’s poetry is to say: slow down. Slow. Down. Take the time to find out the words and let the syntax settle, and get the picture that Hopkins wants to share. And I think that gets at the heart of much of what he’s doing in a poem like “Kingfishers.” If we were to see those gloriously colorful birds as we were going for a walk, it would be right for us to pause, to observe, to watch in appreciation: not to just glance at them (or snap a picture!) and then walk away. So his poem is, in a sense, teaching us to see properly. 

Leah: I love The Lost Words! Last year, I got it for my mother, while my brother got it for me! This was wonderful in an interview with the authors:

I’m reminded of something Jackie said quite early on in our collaboration: “Protest can be beautiful.” I thought, Ah, that’s right. The Lost Words is, we hope, a beautiful protest. In its quiet way, it’s a furious book. Yet it doesn’t let the fury rampage through it. Something about it has given it more ability to drive change in the world than anything I’ve ever written or ever will write. I still don’t know quite why that is, but I do now know that, as Jackie says, protest can be beautiful.

My conversation with Holly Ordway will continue. Please post your own questions and comments below.