Back to Coney Island, Back to “The Windhover”
Conjunctions stir my soul, but where do they leave it? In Ireland (County Down) we again returned to the small village of Coney Island seven years after the first visit, our daughter nearly eight instead of not even one. There was a Wordsworthian, “Tintern Abbey” aspect to it all (“Five years have past; five summers…”), not the least of which given to the fact I had hauled Geoffrey G. Hartman’s The Unmediated Vision stateside to the isle of Eire, and, of its four example poems, the first is that vaunted opening section of the poem. The second is Hopkins’ “The Windhover.”
These two poems had played a considerable role in college, enfolding me into the march of literature — the former because I could clearly understand what the speaker of the poem reached for and the latter because it sounded so radically sumptuous, different from all other ancient soundings I had read/heard in my head, save Shakespeare. I had not kept up with Wordsworth, though I had listened to Geoffrey Hill swoon over Hopkins and “The Windhover,” both in essay and lecture format. What a surprise then to open to “Tintern Abbey” a few days into our Irish stay, as I recalled the teacher, the lecture, the TA for the discussion group, and the inane quizzes on the Romantic Movement at the University of Oregon-Eugene, full of mold, mist, vapor — a fully Wordworthsian environment — and now we were in another one. I read of Wordsworth but thought of Hopkins (and Hopkins died in Dublin — teaching there the last six years of his life). But I’m gliding and striding over stray pieces and waymarkers of time, which all happened in a jumbled format.
What stirs my electrolytes more than Gatorade? Why — stirring for words, as Hopkins’s speaker stirs for a bird. As we walked with our distant family relations, I thought I should read aloud this short poem (a sonnet, in fact) and went to reciting it on a declivity from the Stangford Stone as we went back to the parking lot. “The Windhover” in the windy air, though I could not hope to compare with the Bromwich-infused accent that Geoffrey Hill had given the work to start off his second last Oxford lecture “The Feel of Not to Feel It,” with a monumental recitation, sounding like deep water in a well through those hallowed halls — the long a’s in “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon” stretched and knurled like poised fingers ready to strike, as they should be. Then, I would twenty minutes later gather the kids about me in a high-class yurt (during the hush after ordering and in anticipation of food) and again delve into the spring of “The Windhover,” pulling it up to swallow and spew at the same moment into their ears, commanding the attention of only one of the three youngsters aged seven to thirteen — though not my daughter. (And the day before we’d been walking on the strand that time forgot, by Sheepland bay, near Ardglass, when we swiveled and found twenty feet up in the powder gray sky a bird stood still on the wind, something I didn’t have the right word for till the next day — a windhover.)
I should explain this activity, this yen to share, but to also take centerstage, since I can’t hold audience in any other way except by arching my squeak-prone voice to articulate “shéer plód makes plough down sillion/Shine.” Am I taking hostages? Am I intruding in an obtuse, opaque way? Wouldn’t it be more fitting to start talking about myself — to say, This is what I’ve accomplished, and, This is what I will be doing, and, Oh, how fun my life will be…well, it’s already fun — look at this picture I took in Ireland… What? Not that one? Look at this picture I took of you. Some part of me so loves poetry and the written word that I will do anything to publicize it. This was perhaps the same part of me that used to obsess over baseball statistics from age twelve to sixteen. I needed to turn it all over to another course.
What are words? Are they truly carriers of consciousness? Or of “fake” consciousness? Mediated. Media-ated. But you make those type of word plays in 1973. No matter. In some lecture notes at Dublin college, Hopkins wrote, “We may think of words as heavy bodies, as indoor or out of door objects of nature or man’s art.” Is this true in 2024? Heavy bodies? It’s certainly an image dappled or really sprawled with pixels. Words and images have both cheapened. And what words do still have a power are the most shrill or the most weaponizingly deployed ones. And as I reach to my relative’s bookshelf for George Steiner’s On Difficulty, I imagine this bespectacled author grimacing at the charade ensconcing the globe — he didn’t stand for this and fewer and fewer people will stand for his arch brand of aestheticism. Since the new kingmakers are not too interested in the locomotion of sentences, of language — they are kings and queens, and indeed, the argot still traffics heartily in the use and abuse of words of royalty — those “heavy bodies,” those psychical words (Coleridge: Words are LIVING POWERS), are ignored, the gimmick of the author’s life or plot points are the tinfoil tiaras to being branded as “important.”
F.R. Leavis writes of Hopkins: “His words and phrases are actions as well as sounds, ideas and images, and must…be read with the body as well as with the eye.” Here I might bring up the issue of intimacy. Words are psychical experiences, bodily ones. Then it is easy to understand why so many people nestle close to volumes — a slight to the greater majority who can’t seem to understand the pleasure of poems, of dense texts where one might savor the words, repeating phrases over years of acquaintance, as a few metrical feet of Shakespeare: “That time of year when thou mayest…” Is there any surprise that “word-drunk” is such a popular term — and of disparagement? In trying to merge with a Hopkins “heavy body,” wasn’t I really embodying the words by reciting them? As in, the action was not so much about me and my ego as I thought, but more akin to a fully undesperate measure. Sing a song, read a poem out loud, recite a theatrical speech — embody: the words give body to a spirit, and the voice gives words to other bodies. Hopkins’s words, Hopkins’s soul — Gerke’s voice. A disambiguation? If there can be poetry in the world, and, if I’m the one that must deliver it, I’ll accept such a lot. People must be retrained to stir for a poetic word — even regular words, the ones that resemble runny eggs — though they are the ones that get things done, like calling someone a “motherfucking cocksucker” or saying “I love you” at just the right moment.
Despite the overwhelming techno-aspects of our current world there is something resplendent, even highly beautiful, that artifacts from the past and present and future spin around us — to be found in objects or imagination, and, of course, nature. Hopkins’ poem might never have seen the public eye since the whole batch weren’t released until almost thirty years after his death, but here and there at present they are strangely binding — from the Norton Anthology back to poetical studies of the sixties and over to Poetry Magazine online, where “The Windhover” is featured with an irritatingly jaundiced set of blocks for unfamiliar words or ones that are “too difficult” to decode — and for Hopkins, ten words or phrases are gashed with this fake gold. Despite these struggles or constructions, poetry and art literally stand still in wind like that windhover, as we hold our breath, watching for the next turn of the screw, whether it be story or sentence or image — or actor acting.
Most everything we do is about something else rather than the thing that is being done — like volunteering or being kind to someone in hopes of what they can deliver in the future. Or reciting “The Windhover.” I am creating something, and I don’t expect to be understood, though I do believe people will value the act of oratory because it tells them that the words are worthy — they’ve been written down and survived the centuries. One of the greatest experiences in life is finding out what you once thought boring holds many wonderments that make the wind break and the body twist because of the pressure in nature or the art object. I need to be present when my daughter will break out and value the “lyrics” of at least a few of these poets rather than the latest pop star. It has happened in bits. After reading her Gertrude Stein, she made a poem of imitation in the same maddeningly childlike style. And maybe after all the dusts settles, people know in their heart of hearts that words are “heavy bodies.” Some mixture of them thumps around in our brains for years, whether happy, sad, or speckled.
