Like almost everything Hopkins wrote, this is incredibly beautiful and incredibly powerful linguistically (I think he’s the most linguistically gifted poet in the English language, along with Keats), but it is also peculiarly disturbing, if read carefully.
I will refer you to the phrase, Have, get, before it cloy. Isn’t it possible that our holy and masterful poet is hoping for an early death for these “innocent” minds–which will spare them the “occasion of sin”? No doubt Hopkins was a brilliant intellectual and something of a saint, but we should not make the mistake of thinking him a “modern man” no matter how radical his poetic technique is (so radical that modern poetry is still trying to catch up with it); his is, instead, an almost medieval mind.
Which shouldn’t prevent us from loving him–even, perhaps, from asking for his intercession, in our prayers.
Like almost everything Hopkins wrote, this is incredibly beautiful and incredibly powerful linguistically (I think he’s the most linguistically gifted poet in the English language, along with Keats), but it is also peculiarly disturbing, if read carefully.
I will refer you to the phrase, Have, get, before it cloy. Isn’t it possible that our holy and masterful poet is hoping for an early death for these “innocent” minds–which will spare them the “occasion of sin”? No doubt Hopkins was a brilliant intellectual and something of a saint, but we should not make the mistake of thinking him a “modern man” no matter how radical his poetic technique is (so radical that modern poetry is still trying to catch up with it); his is, instead, an almost medieval mind.
Which shouldn’t prevent us from loving him–even, perhaps, from asking for his intercession, in our prayers.