The dearest freshness deep down things: annie.micro.blog
@Annie That’s a favorite of mine also and I love that you left in your struggle to remember that line! Excellent.
@JohnBrady @annie There’s something particularly about “shook foil” and “bright wings” that grabs me every time.
@JohnBrady Foil, as a sword, is surely apt; but Hopkins apparently meant something closer to your first reading: “I mean foil in the sense of leaf or tinsel… Shaken goldfoil gives off broad glares like sheet lightning and also… owing to its zigzag dints and creasings… a sort of fork lightning too.”
@JohnBrady I thought I’d remembered the goldleaf reference, but couldn’t remember where. Searching brought up this site. Footnote 18 deals with that one. “… ooze of oil / Crushed” isn’t mentioned in the footnotes, unfortunately.
@Annie Ah, beautiful. I should get back to memorizing poetry (and start with that one). I took it up for awhile when my daughter had to do it as part of her homeschool curriculum—she was vastly better at it of course, being eight or nine years old—but then dropped it. I think I still remember all of Wendell Berry’s “Mad Farmer Revolution.”
@JohnBrady I imagine crushing something like a seed, the oil welling up and oozing out. But the enjambment makes “crushed” a transition to “why do men not reck his rod?” and what follows. I’m probably wrong. Either way it is a strange image for grandeur.
@dwalbert that’s part of what I love about the poem and Hopkins generally. The grandeur of God is like the ooze of oil crushed? And yet, yes. Hopkins showing us God not as tyrannical father demanding praise but God as humble, sacrificial, with love encompassing such tenderness that even the most divine grandeur is best shown as something lowly, trod upon, and willing to let it be so.