GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS - some poems

(28/7/1844 - 8/6/1885)
Gerald Manley Hopkins was a daring innovator at a time of largely traditional verse, his life was built on renunciation and self-denial, he found lots of things quite testing and morally dangerous, but seemed to have a go anyway. His life spent hemmed in by personal guilt and scrupulousness encouraged no doubt by the constricting doctrines of 1860s Oxford. His personality was of great complexity, this is what all biographers seem to note, his descent into darkness and depression. Anyway I will endeavor to explore him further later in the year. First and foremost he was a poet, so here I will just post a few of his that reveal this calling. I will add that many of his poems were produced in relation to his spiritual state which were just another addition perhaps to his own complicated emotions. Enjoy.

SPRING AND FALL.
to a young child

MARGARET, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
it will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

PEACE

When will yiu ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

ANDROMEDA

NOW Time's Andromeda on this rock rude,
With not her either beauty's equal or
Her injury's, look off by both horns of shore,
Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon food.
Time past she has been attempted and pursued
By many blows and banes; but now hears roar
A wilder beast from West than all were, more
Rifle in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.

Her Perseus linger and leave her to her extremes?-
Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs
His thoughts on her, forsaken that she seems,
All while her patience, morselled into pangs,
Mounts; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,
With Gorgon's gear and barebill/ thongs and fangs.

RIBBLESDALE

EARTH, sweet Eart, sweet landscape, with leaves throng
And louched low grass, heaven that dost appeal
To, with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel;
That canst but only be, but dost that long -

Thou canst but be, but that thou well dost; strong
Thy plea with him who dealt, nay does now deal,
Thy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel
Thy river, and o'er gives all to rack or wrong.

And what is Earh's eye, tongue, or heart else, where
Else, but in dearand dogged man?- Ah, the heir
To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn,
To thriftless reave bothour rich round world bare
And none reck of world after, this bids wear
Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern.

THE MYTH OF DEFENSIVE MILITARY UAVS

Nearly all politicians in West Wales either support the Parc Aberporth UAV testing zone without question and support it for non-military use only ( but still fail to condemn it even though its use for the forseeable future will be overwhelmingly military ); or support it for civilian and defensive military use only.
Those of us against military use entirely would argue that locating people with a UAV site in order that they can be killed with a bomb dropped by a war plane, rather blurs the offensive/defensive distinction for those politicians who still think that they know which is which, this report from WWW.trainingconf.com should finally disabuse them.

The Uk could intergrate a light-weight weapon with its Thales Uk/ Elbit Systems Watchkeeper 450 tactical unmanned air vehicles, operations of which should begin late next year.
"We are conducting analysis to investigate the contribution that an armed Watchkeeper UAV system could make in current and future operations,"
confirms minister for International degence and security Baroness Taylor.
Taylor's comments represent the first time that the MOD has acknowledged the possibility of arming the British Army's future WK450 air vehicles. One likely candidate is Thames Air Systems' lightweight multirole missile (LKM), which has previously been shown at exhibitions with a full scale model of the WK450.
WK450 air vehicle Flight-test activities should start before year-end at the Park Aberporth UAV cenre of excellence in West Wales. The Royal Air force already operatesGeneral Atomics MQ-9 Reaper UAVs carrying GBU-12 Paveway II precision guided bombs and Lockhead Martin AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missiles.
So "Watchkeeper becomes "Watchkiller". What rationale will the politicians invent now to justify their continued support for Parc Aberporth.

With thanks to Bro Emlyn Peace and Justice Group

Happy Easter now
Peace/heddwch

RANT

Charming David Cameron,
walks through the door
looking quite debonair,
he just keeps hanging around
pretending to care.

He's cruising for your favour
but the stink of Thatcher's breath,
stalks him everywhere
it worries me, should worry all
disturb our sleep, our waking falls.

Miniature dinosaurs
cosying up to to big business,
wearing the same hats
and their old school ties,
and their ugly transparent smiles.

Remember the last time,
nothing much has changed
they made promises then
in order to catch our vote,
still wearing the same ruddy
overcoat.

Lying is the tory's one true calling
with unblinking eyes they then attack,
champions of the privileged elite
this broken economy we live in,
an example of their twisted legacy.

Still a party of the right,
though now dressed in soft blue
the same old bullshit, the same old lies,
their smarmy handshakes
offering only a poisoned chalice.

God help the lonely and the helpless,
the old, the poor, the frial and meek,
they will kill our spirit,
they will steal the light,
the bell tolls, THIS IS A WARNING!

Spectre of another era
of divide and conquer,
the ghosts of a not to distant past,
returning to ruin this countries future
because we voted for an arse.

A KIND OF RELIGION - by Colin MacInnes.

Colin MacInnes was born on the 20th August 1914, and was known primarily as an English novelist. He was also openly bisexual, yet an outsider, a champion of youth and there many subcultures. A precursor to many pop anthropologists. He was most at ease in the coffee bars and jazz clubs of Soho and Notting Hill, author of the London Novels - Absolute Beginners, City of Spades and Mr Love and Justice from which this following essay is drawn from.
A brilliant chronicler of British life, one of the first to deeply explore its many boundaries. A broad palette he had indeed covering racial tensions, drugs, anarchy and decadence. A man of strong humanistic values and a strong moral committment, in the 1960s he became a press officer for an organisation of Blacks in Notting Hill called Defence, he was the only white person involved and became a kind of propogandist for the notorious Black Power leader-cum hustler Michael X. In 1971 on a British Council tour of Africa his behaviour was so outrageous that officials were forced to put a stop to it. Later that year the "OZ" trial on youth and censorship and the trial of the " Mangrove 9" bought out his better side. He died on April 22, 1976, the following essay I hope displays the depth of his writing, most of his books are still in print and are well worth checking out.

" I published some years ago a novel called "Mr Love & Justice".Superficially, this a realistic portrait of the worlds of the police and prostitution, and as such was kindly acclaimed by not very acute reviewers for its factual actuality. But my true intention was to write a morality, or religious allegory. Frankie Love, the professional ponce "lover", has no understanding of love, which he mistakes for mere sexuality; but he does have a profound sense of justice, and this very virtue brings about his material, if not spiritual, ruin. Edward Justice, the copper and professional upholder of the law, has no sense of justice, which he equates with power; but he does possess a deep instinct for spiritual ( as well as sexual ) love, and this, too, encompasses his material destruction. Each man, in his acts, betrays his supposed conventional virtue, and is in turn betrayed into a fall that brings truth and understanding by the real virtue of which he is unaware.
The final scene of this novel takes place in a hospital, where both men lie wounded, and where each man finally becomes, as the result of his material fall and inner illumination, identical with the other. (Hence the title "Mr Love & Justice, " and not "Mr Love & Mr Justice", which several benelovent critics said it should have been.) I had hoped this hospital scene would be read in two ways, on teo levels: both as what it is, realistically, and also as an allegory of purgatory. If read in the latter sense, the "nurses", "doctors" and invisible "specialists" take on another meaning and dimension. I planted clues all over the place, and particularly in the final paragraph, when the word "God" is used for the first and only time in the whole book.
That everyone ( so far as I know ) entirely missed the point of my endeavour may prove artistic incompetence, or perhaps that the religious instinct I thought I possessed was unconvincing; yet it may also be that the kind of person who happens to like what I write (or what he thinks I do) cannot imagine that a "serious" writer, yet one not overtly adhering to any denominational faith, would ever be compelled by a religious theme at all.
To try to situate the religious element which I concieve exists in myself and in others of my countrymen (but which the orthodox would consider not religious at all or, at best heretical), may I beg indulgence for a further autobiographical fragment.
I was reared by an unbaptized mother, and have myself never been baptized. The only tangential religious instruction I recieved was ata Presbyterian school, where my admiration for the goodness of many of my teachers was matched by the horror I felt at their theology, once I grew to understand it. I passed through the usual phase of adolescent religiosity and then, after much reading - Marx, Freud and about older rival faiths, for instance - and considerable inquiry among believers of various sects, arrived at a total doubt about historical religions which still remains with me; yet something which I take to be religious also remains.
Before trying to define this, may I please make it clear I do not wish to give offence, do not presume to be " right", nor do I of course, wish to suggest I am a good person at all. So: a personal God, an indentifiable devil, miracles ( including an immaculate conception) and any kind of physical after-life are to me not only incredible but paltry concepts. What remains?
On a radio interview not long ago with Norman Mailer (who, in contrast to the popular and partly self-created notion of him as a roaring boy and intellectual hipster, I take in fact to be an almost rabbinical moralist), the conversation turned chiefly on the concept of God. According to Mailer, God is not omnipotent, but dependent on us as we on Him. Satan was not thrown down from heaven - he tore himself out of it by the force of his own evil, and God could not prevent this. The whole universe - as each human life - consists of a creative and a destructive force. The meaning of our lives is to add to the positive, and repel the negative. In so far as we do, we survive eternally in essence. If sufficient of us fail, we help drag the whole cosmos into destruction, and all life, physical and spiritual, comes to its end.
This concept ( which is no doubt an ancient heresy, refuted by many a skilled theoligian - not to mention by atrocious religious wars) has reality for me. It explains a lot of things which in conventional theology ( and despite every twist of sophisticated logic, or the armature of an unquestioning faith), remain otherwise inexplicable. It explains why God is both omnipotent and powerless, why evil and cruelty must exist as well as good and kindness, and it explains , most pertinently of all, the imperative necessity for a constant personal choice. To act well or ill is no longer a mere matter of individual salvation, nor of pleasing God: to act well or ill involves the very existence of God, mankind, the whole firmament.
I think anyone with a feeling of this kind may have agreat awareness, and acceptance, of the laws of life that come directly and observedly from nature, and yet will constantly be conscious of an otherness, of a reality both in and outside all our lives, in function of which he also lives even if, by his deeds, he may deny it. This otherness I can best define as a perpetual sensation that life exists in ways the brain and even imagination cannot apprehend - but of which a powerfully intuitive instinct ( which I expect the orthodox mean by a soul) is constantly aware despite itself, and by no act of concious volition. Accompanying this, will be a compelling sensation that the forces of good and of creation, and evil and destruction - impersonal, eternal, locked in perpetual battle - exist in everyone and thing, and even as potent essences in themselves that cannot entirely be identified nor defined by the evidence of their effects on mankind or nature.
Persons who feel all this will not be religious, like the chuchman, by any hope of areward, but simply by necessity: for the invisible life seems as inescapably real to them as does the kife their five senses know in nature - and no one exppects rewards for recognising natural fact. Nor, for such persons, is this any matter of "belief" at all. To me, this very word is suspect, since it implies blind effort of a desperate will. I would rather say, not that I " believe" thes things, but that after forty-eight years of thinking, reading and then questioning, then to such as I am, the concept is so real as to impose itself, and thus be beyond belief..."

FROM
Spectator, February 1963

Music - Alan Norman Bold .( b, 1942)

Music is an ocean that covers the world,
An element that lets you drown in air.
It moves beyond time, rocks with rhythm,
Speaks for itself with sweet tongued tunes,
With a wierd wordless eloquence,
With a primitive chaotic power.
It is everywhere,
International in tone,
Atonal, harmonic,
Dodecaphonic;
Concerted in effort, symphonic,
Or absolutely simple and singable.
Those old wives' tales, the ballads,
Unfold ancient stories
That stall for time,
Submerge themselves.
Into the same ocean drop the names
Of the great ones whose tunes
Call out to posterity,
Beckon like bells:
Bach to Berg and beyond.
Music has no frontiers,
Being an embraceable art,
And so alongside Stravinksy
Is Elvis intoning the sameraw truth
That takes the edge off the emotions.
And you , dear Bob, with your headphones on,
Saturating yourself in Verdi and Rossini,
Are recieving and returnig
The message of music
Which is that our species
Can, by listening, survive.

(For Bob Giddings) (1983)

VERNAL EQUINOX - 3 Poems by Thomas Hardy.

words, sometimes are enough. In times dangling between extremes.

A BACKWARD SPRING

The trees are afraid to put forth buds,
And there is timidity in the grass;
The plots lie gray where gouged by spuds,
And whether next week will pass
Free of sly sour winds in the fret of each bush
Of barberry waiting to bloom.

Yet the snowdrop's face betrays no gloom,
And the primrose pants in its heedless push,
Though the myrtle asks if it's worth the fight
This year with frost and rime
To venture one more time

On delicate leaves and buttons of white
From the selfsame bough as at last year's prime,
And never to ruminate on or remember
What happened to it in mid-December.

IF ITS EVER SPRING AGAIN
(Song)

If it's ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I when
Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,

Seeing me not, amid their flounder,
Standing with my arm around her;
If it's ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I then.

If it's ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay crop at the prime,
And the cuckoos- two - in rhyme,
As they used to be, or seemed to,
We shall do as long we've dreamed to,
If it's ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay, and bees achime.

THE YEARS AWAKENING
How do you know that the pilgrin track
Along the belting zodiac
Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds
Is traced by now to the Fishes' bounds
And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud
Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,
And never as yet a tinct of spring
Has shown in the Earh's apparelling;
O vespering bird, how do you know,
How do you know?

How do you know, deep underground,
Hid in your bed from sight and sound,
Without a turn in temperature,
With weather life can scarce endure,
That light has won a fraction's strength,
And day put on some moments' length,
Whereof in merest rote will come,
Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb;
O crocus root, how do you know,
How do you know?


MARCH HARES NOW BREEDING

" The Hare is a simple creature, having no defence but to run away, yet it is subtle... for she keepeth not her youngones together in one litter, but layeth them a furlong, from one another, that she may not lose them all if permadventure men or beasts light on them."

EDWARD TOPSELL " History of Four-footed Beasts " 1607

To carry a hare's foot is very lucky - but only if it contains jointed bones - and is a sovereign remedy against gout, stomach pains and insomnia.

" It is found by Experience that when one keeps a Hare alive and feedeth him, till he have occasion to eat him, if he tells him before he kills him, that he will do so, the hare will thereupon be found dead, having killed himself. "

JOHN AUBREY " Remains of Gentilism " 1688

CARDIGAN BAY SPRINGTIME

RACHEL CORRIE - Palestine mark's activist's death.

Rachel Aliene Corrie ( April 10, 1979 - March 16, 2003 ) was an American member of the International Solidarity Movement who was murdered by the Israel Defense Forces while bravely acting as a human shield while attempting to prevent IDF forces from demolishing the home of a local Palestinian pharmacist named Samir Nasrallah. This week marks 7 years since she was killed ironically by American funded Israeli bulldozers.
The Palestinian people have not forgotten her bravery. This week Ramallah residents honoured her by naming a street after her. Their was a dedication ceremony to her on Tuesday where family, friends and supporters gathered to pay there respects.
Ms Corrie's mother Cindy is visiting Israel and the Occupied Territories at themoment to take part in a wrongful death lawsuit against the Israeli government, thanked the Palestinian people for continuing to provide her family with unfailing support.
Addressing a crowd of about 50 Palestinians, including the mayor of Ramallah, Ms Corrie said: " I just wanted you to know that you do not stand alone - people are stepping up, we will not be silent. Meanwhile the killing continues, let us try not to forget this, and the occupation continues and grows with recent news that Israel's Interior Ministry's has approved of new housing for Jewish settlers in occupied East Jerusalem. Unfortunately for some there will never be any peace.
SOURCES - foreigneditor@peoples-press.com

POEM TO RACHEL CORRIE
by Hilda Silverman, USA
March 18, 2003

Whatever words might have been adequate
have become a high fluting cry

like the keening whit-tu-tu
of the unseen bird outside

my window. Allday I have been trying
to break free from the bulldozer's

blade, piled earth, steel treads fracturing
skull and chest, that moment of resistance

and protest, stilled frame reverberating
beyond the moment, like the kid

in Tiananmen Square before the tank.
Her bright orange jacket

and megaphone.
Her kind and tired eyes.

All day I have been pierced
by the high note of helplesness,

the ragged beat of despair.
Shrouded body with its blur of blood.

The quiet hands of mourners
bearing her, flag-sheathed, across the town.

*

And why was she there?
Ask the ones whose truth she saw

and sought to speak. Ask the child
sitting atop slanting slabs

of concrete, debris of his demolished home.
Ask the husband of the pregnant woman

trapped beneath crushing rubble,
the neighbor's bulldozed house

bringing their own walls down,
who cradled her toddler as she died

Ask the families - hundreds
huddled in wind-ripped tents

homes wrecked without warning
to make way for the seperation wall.

Ask the ones who aren't American
and don't make the morning news.

*

Whatever words we have are useless
against this cruel weight. The bird's cry

Keens from every crack in the edifice
of history. Before she died, Rachel Corrie wrote

of the privilege granted her, an outsider,
but denied to those under occupation.

"I have a home.
I am allowed to go see the ocean."


Hilda Silverman is a writer and member of Visions of Peace with Justice in Israel/Palestine (VOPJ), an association of Jews in Greater Boston working to promote a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.