I am sure most readers of this blog are aware of Red-wattled Lapwing, a common bird that many might have even spotted, but Yellow-wattled though common in the peninsula is a difficult sighting partly due to the fact that it is much silent as also found in dry open country unlike Red-wattled -that is loquacious to an irritating level as also a demonstrative bird often sighted near water bodies. Smaller than Red-wattle Yellow-wattled Lapwings has obvious distinction of yellow colored wattle –a fleshy extension in front of eyes that meet above the beak. An interesting fact about this bird is their eggs are pyriform, that is, broad and obtuse at one end and sharp pointed at the other. So while hatching the pointed side is towards the ground thus taking minimum brooding space.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: the words are wild!
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.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest who wrote poems, you would expect his poems to be on clichéd line, you know about religion-morality and so on, even this blogger did and was almost dismissive in the beginning until I got myself into his world. The quaintness of divinity reflected in all can be charming (reminds me of bhakti poems). Rarely have i read someone so experimental and innovative, he even created his own words, his own language, his “inscape”. Hopkin writes “...all therefore that I think of doing is to keep my verses together in one place- at present I have not even correct copies-, that, if anyone should like, they might be published after my death. And that again is unlikely, as well as remote... No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.” He writes somewhere else “....but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.”It need be noted here that he achieved acclaim posthumously since he held the view that publishing the poems would violate the humility required from him as a priest. What enchantingly uninhibited poems these....
Spring and Fall
(to a young child)
Margret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! 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, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
To Christ our Lord
I Caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom
of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend:
the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, -the achieve of, the mastery of the
thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a
billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down
sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim:
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and
plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Caged Skylark
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house,
dwells-
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sometimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest—
Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.
Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bones risen.
Another scribble from my writing pad...
Wild flowers
Who knows, what will become of us
perhaps it will be the seed dropped from the bird
that sprout into wild flowers
all senses capsulated
in a sway in the breeze
