Hurrahing in Harvest
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-waiver Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across the skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic - as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! - These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart réars wíngs bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
I was tempted, what with Good Friday being the crucifixion day, to use one of GMH’s despair poems. But then I thought, ‘My guys don’t want despair! They want the gusto and glory of the natural world!’ So, ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’. And yes, I know it’s a seasonal misfit and that I’ll still be here in the late summer and should have saved it until then, but, well, who knows what’ll have transpired (expired) by then. Shit. I was meant to avoid the misery stuff.
So, poem. Well, first the poet. GMH was born in Essex, went to Highgate School and then Oxford before becoming a Jesuit and heading to Ireland via North Wales. He is one of my absolute all-time, best-ever heroes. I love the condensed passion of his poetry – whether glorifying nature or expressing his extreme depression during crises of faith. I love the incredible way he transformed rhythm, a process he called ‘sprung rhythm’ (which you’ll hopefully hear if you listen to my reading). His poetry, he said, was meant to be read with the ear not the eye. The imagery is creative and often uses neologisms, compound words and the innovative use of language.
It’s important to bear in mind that he is a religious poet. He is, in praising nature, praising God through nature. Yet there remains a tension between the spiritual and purely religious and, in contrast, the very passionate appreciation of the physical world. And one important philosophical aspect: GMH has two related concepts that are very apparent in this poem and also in others like ‘Pied Beauty’ and ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ – inscape and instress. Inscape is the utterly individual uniqueness of a thing, which is almost like its essence, but remains immanent until it is brought out by the act of observation. Instress is the force of recognising, of conscious of, that essence. I love this concept – which GMH would have seen in religious terms (humanity’s ability to appreciate God’s creation or God in creation) but which has resonance in certain New Age beliefs (and even certain slightly way-out scientists) that ‘consciousness is the universe becoming aware of itself.’ I don’t fall into either category, yet on a personal level, it feels to me like the utter being-in-the-moment-ness when you appreciate a rose or a starry night or a lover’s eyes. Or a new bottle of bleach that you didn’t know you had.
This poem is very special to me. I studied it at A Level and I maybe wrote about it for my Oxford entrance exam too, but then later, when I was very new to working in television, the woman that came to our local TV company to give voice coaching used it as an exercise to get me to put more expression in my voice. Later still, when I was learning to speak again after I had by teeth kicked out by a horse, I read it with the speech therapist.
Right, let’s make a start.
The sheer enthusiasm of the title is then somewhat offset by the sense of regret in ‘Summer ends now’. This phrase is on a falling note, but at once the mood rises – and the line ends with the word ‘rise’ as we are lifted up again. This is so rich. There is the reminder that all that ends in nature is part of a cycle; that in reality, nothing ends, for every end is a beginning. The repeated ‘now’ brings us right into the moment and also is also a device to make the rhythm more powerful. ‘Barbarous in beauty’ is lovely – the contrast between barbarous (uncivilised and wild) with beauty; the etymology of barbarous, which contains the sense of ‘bearded’ (the Romans disliked wild, bearded people), which in turn suggests at the spiky, scratchiness of straw, and of course the alliteration.
Note that the word ‘rise’ at the end of line one is not the end of the thought – which continues with the first word (‘Around’) of the following line. I seem to recall that the term is enjambement, but don’t quote me – and I’m writing in the garden without WiFi. This affects how you read the poem as the phrase ‘the stooks rise / Around’ has an enforced slight pause in the middle, which effectively emphasises both words, so that the brain computes rise, with the upwardness, and then around, with the sense of being surrounded. Both dimensions get enhanced in the mind by this pause. And then we are carried upwards again (‘up above’) before a fine example of GMH’s effusive language. The description of the clouds as ‘wind-walks’ – imagine how paths through long grass weave and swirl, just so in the sky. ‘Silk-sack’ too is unusual – bringing together the softness as well as the mass. The repeated exclamations add to the feeling of enthusiasm and wonder, encouraging the reader to share the poet’s enjoyment.
This image is continued in the question ‘has wilder, wilful-wavier / Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?’ I just can’t say enough about this – it’s richer than a Christmas cake with added figs and port wine. OK. Easiest part first – the repeated ‘w’ and then ‘m’ sounds – they are soft sounds which match the tactile sense of what he is describing. ‘Wilder’ brings us back to that idea expressed in ‘barbarous’ – this is part of the natural world, not a man-made habitat (yes, I know it’s agricultural, but we’re not in a stately drawing-room – that’s the distinction). The beauty is outside humanity’s control, is created not by us. ‘Wilful-wavier’ allows the clouds themselves – or perhaps their Creator – agency, they are willfully spread, an act of will, but without plan, just for the sheer joy of it. There is also a passing reference to sea-scapes. ‘Meal-drift’ re-emphasises the softness brought to mind by the word ‘silk’ but also draws us back to the harvest theme. Moulded and melted give us a visual signal as to the spread as well as offering an idea of texture – a moulded surface may be uneven.
Now, I’m listening to a book by Will Storr about storytelling and how language is processed in the brain. Apparently, the boffins in white coats have found that our eyes and brain track what we are reading physically in that the eyes look up (if you map the saccades, rather than in a conscious way) when we read of tall things and things in the sky and look left or right or down when pointed in those directions. We become active in the act of reading about action, as it were. So in the first line of the next section, GMH takes us with him – ‘I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, / Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour’. Gleaning, the separation of wheat from chaff, returns us again to harvest, while the word – and GMH likes this kind of thing, sounds a lot like ‘gleam’ – that’s there too. Glean also gives the impression of the way that what is there, immanent but hidden, is revealed.
The next line – ‘And éyes, heárt, what looks…’ – is an example of sprung rhythm – GMH puts those accents to make the reader place emphasis on those two words. The two words are also repeated from two lines before, which adds resonance. What he is saying here is that just as the beauty fills his eyes, his heart is filled with evidence of God’s love. In this case, Christ’s, I suppose. But note how very physical this is – the looks and the lips, ‘Rapturous love’s greeting’ – he could be talking of a lover. It’s rather like the Mediaeval mystics who would speak in these terms. I think St Augustine does too, in his Confessions. There is a profound sense of the corporeality of the divine. The real and round reply is also a very dramatic contrast to what GMH expresses in his despair sonnets, in which he speaks to God and gets no reply (even using the image of writing a letter and getting nothing in return). Here, though, his faith is strongly reaffirmed by the sense of Christ in the natural world.
This is inscape on a divine level – the whole of Creation has at its essence God’s love and GMH is expressing his joy at the consciousness of it.
This section, like the last, ends in a question – but the sight itself is the reply. The wonder of the world is the answer. All this is expanded in the final section.
Starting the section with ‘And’ changes the mood. This line also brings a new, slower, more deliberate rhythm – from the ecstasy to the contemplation. The line is startlingly beautiful. ‘Azurous-hung hills’ signifies the idea both of the hills bedecked with azure, glowing with light, but also the idea of them being above. He describes them as ‘his world-wielding shoulder / Majestic ’ – stressing again the physicality of the divine, but also God’s power and strength, literally (!) holding up the world through the continuing, eternal act of creation. The enjambement does it’s work again, putting stress on ‘Majestic’ – with its connotations of the divine as lord, master, ruler. And that concept is carried on with ‘as a stallion stalwart’, bringing with it the powerful masculinity that Jesuits seemed to sense in the divine. Yet GMH counters that immediately with, one of my favourite phrases ever, ‘very-violet-sweet!’ The words are hyphenated to make this one compound concept. And it is just wonderful – that great contrast, the stallion and the tiniest flower; the power and the delicacy; the force and the sweetness.
Note that we have only been given colour words in these two lines – the azure and the violet (Mary’s traditional cloak is perhaps very understatedly inferred?) – and they are words at the opposite end of the palette from the harvest yellows and golds. I don’t know precisely, but it feels to me that the rich, warm colours brought to mind by harvest and stooks, meal and gleaning carried all that rich enthusiasm, while here there’s a sense of calm – which is temporary, for the emotion rises again.
The repetition of ‘these things’ pins the exactness of the natural world in mind, the concreteness, and also begins to build the rhythmic force again. These things were here – God created the world first, of course, and ‘but the beholder / Wanting.’ Oh, and this is clever! God created man to praise creation, that’s one sense, in that the beholder was missing until Adam and Eve. But think of it too as the beholder wanting to see, to experience, to appreciate this wonderful world.
And here is the huge and powerful description of instress, with the imagery and the rhythm working together to make the final two lines a dramatic culmination.
The heart réars wíngs bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
The heart rears – this repeats the idea of the heart rising in the previous section, but also gives the image of the heart growing wings. I seem to recall some Christian images of hearts with wings, but that could have been a Modernist painting. Anyway, ‘bold and bolder’ encapsulates the growing confidence and force of faith, while also suggesting a mirroring of that proud stallion theme, within the devout Christian. The final line gives an even more powerful sense of the strength of faith, it’s not just the heart that rises up to the Lord, the true believer is almost of that world wielding strength shown by God, can also fling earth aside and fly up to embrace Christ.
I am carried away by the imagery and emotion of this poem. As an atheist. My experience of instress matches the poet’s, and I am getting it vicariously, through the verse and without his faith.
I really hope you experience some of this awe as well.
Have good Good Friday.
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