Nothing is so beautiful as spring–
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.–Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
—G.M.H
Does he deliver on the promise? Can he get away with his first line (did you even notice he’s missing a syllable)?
This isn’t among the worlds greatest sonnets, nor among the best of Hopkins. The feeling is authentic, his expression is not tortured; yet he lags a little in this sonnet, and I wonder if the meaning is not too contrived.
The line with ‘look little low’ is awkward. But then comes ‘rinse and wring’, so right, and ‘the glassy peartree’ while boggling imagination, one is nevertheless inclined to trust him on it, especially when he takes the common expression of having trees brushing the sky and makes it fresh again with the descending blue all in a rush.
It is hard to judge a cliche so far away in time, but ‘racing lambs’ strikes one as a non-description, and with ‘fair their fling’ you wonder if anastrophe is just a trick he kept attempting, like dice. But then comes ‘juice’ and ‘joy’ and you are once again prepared to forgive all. ‘Sour with sinning’ is somehow unanticipated (‘as sinning until he was sour’ would not be), but what the dickens does it all mean?
If Spring means what he has suggested, somehow the end doesn’t follow. The imperatives, the urgency, none of these things really seem to work, especially the concluding prosaic commendation. God glorifies himself in rescuing the undeserving, not the heavenly; the poetry of redemption lies all in the dissimilarity between redeemer and redeemed, the similarities (if I may be permitted to put it this way) are all ironical, however necessary.
What Hopkins does calls to mind is what Vaughan, Traherne and Wordsworth believed about natural innocence, but the comparison is hardly favorable, as they make you want to believe it. From Hopkins we get on this occasion a somewhat wilted piety, I’m afraid.
He was a great poet. I wish I could fail this wonderfully.
Unknowing 