Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).  Poems.  1918.

36. The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo  

 (Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)

THE LEADEN ECHO

How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away? Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep, Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey? No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none,        5 Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair, Do what you may do, what, do what you may, And wisdom is early to despair: Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done To keep at bay        10 Age and age’s evils, hoar hair, Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay; So be beginning, be beginning to despair. O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none: Be beginning to despair, to despair,        15 Despair, despair, despair, despair. 

        Spare! There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!); Only not within seeing of the sun, Not within the singeing of the strong sun,        20 Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air, Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one, Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place, Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone, Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet        25 Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face, The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet, Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth! Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,        30 Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace— Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath, And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.        35 See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair Is, hair of the head, numbered. Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept, This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold        40 What while we, while we slumbered. O then, weary then why When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care, Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder        45 A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.— Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder, Yonder.

Jimmie’s got a goil

                              goil

                                     goil,

                                            Jimmie

’s got a goil and

she coitnly can shimmie

when you see her shake

                                    shake

                                             shake,

                                                        when

you see her shake a

shimmie how you wish you was Jimmie.

Oh for such a gurl

                            gurl

                                   gurl,

                                           oh

for such a gurl to

be a fellow’s twistandtwirl

talk about your Sal-

                             Sal-

                                    Sal-,

                                            talk

about your Salo

-mes but gimmie Jimmie’s gal.

e.e. cummings from is 5 (1926)

Boy, why are you (knowing all that you are good for)

crying? You sound all like dawn-time full of round robins,

 round robin red breast with white eye rings out crying

on the morning green.

I can hear you from here, from the windowsills,

in the old holly tree you’re calling, calling, curious and calling

“What’s your name?”  into the rising blue. Iris, Echo answer, earnestly,

“Wendy Moira Angela Darling”, but it seems you forget it all by noon.

Names don’t last too long, like spring, or cities, or even cities falling into spring.

It seems, to soothe your wanting, boy, you place all that you love into a giant heap to dip in bronze, to steady, halt them, to hold forever and, being selfish, keep, like your father’s bookend shoes or dipped wildflowers from St. Timothy’s creek. Looking, looking under rocks, the moon, you with your muddy, blondish locks picking the ground for rings, shinier, happier things underneath the garden gate. They found you there underneath that gate, clawing underneath that garden gate. They caught you there underneath that garden gate  at the feral age of two. Boy, where were you going with all those feathers in your hair?

                    Hildegard’s Vision, from the Scivias Codex (1174)

                    ‘O Viridissima Virga’ - composed ca. 1140 -1179

                              by St.Hildegard von Bingen.

       Song courtesy of Camden Kimura, uploader, and her mother, vocalist.

                             Translation by Christopher Page

A white doe on the green grass appeared to me, with two golden
horns, between two rivers, in the shade of a laurel, when the sun
was rising in the unripe season.

Her look was so sweet and proud that to follow her I left every
task, like the miser who as he seeks treasure sweetens his trouble
with delight.

“Let no one touch me,” she bore written with diamonds and
topazes around her lovely neck. “It has pleased my Caesar to
make me free.”

And the sun had already turned at midday; my eyes were tired
by looking but not sated, when I fell into the water, and she
disappeared.

my-ear-trumpet:

lucyphermann:

collettecollette:

Harry Clarke, spine illustration for The Selected Poems of Swinburne (1928)

Loss is a matte white shell,

a cockle born from good-byes

of any sort. They build colonies,

one on top of another in the either sea

or heart, of which cockles base their shape.

Mollusks keep their innards in as some keep pain;

clamped, shut, and buried in the clay. The mimicry

of ventricles still hold the pangs of absence,

in and out as it siphons all the dirt.

They hold everything inside, until pried open

by scuttling crabs or the hunger of a gluttonous gull

named guilt. Otherwise they keep it all within themselves,

until rough and tumbled, coughed up upon the shore,

where children count them in the peppered sand,

feel their shape, either whole or splintered,

and not knowing their weight,

go and pluck them

for a pail.

In Brittany the sea has its own voice,

it tolls when it finds itself  in the midst of a storm.

A bell sound too and fro, too and fro to try and calm

its own undercurrents , the angry pull of the moon

who long ago sighed out the white capped

swells of hippocampus, the stampede

of water that broke the levees and swallowed up

Ys, so eagerly.  The church bells  ring:

“Solemn, solemn, no more sleep and solemn,

how good it is to rise today, how good it is

to rise today.”