Not for the first time, I find the character and background of today's poet more interesting than his poetry.
That is not to say that I find today's poem dull - in fact I rather like it, with its alliterative description of the university city of Oxford.
First, the poem:
DUNS SCOTUS'S OXFORD
Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;
Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers.
Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;
Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
About the Poet:
Gerard Hopkins was born July 28, 1844, to Manley and Catherine (Smith) Hopkins, the first of their nine children. His parents were High Church Anglicans (variously described as "earnest" and "moderate"), and his father, a marine insurance adjuster, had just published a volume of poetry the year before
In 1866 he was received by John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church and the following year he won First-Class degrees in Classics and "Greats" (a rare "double-first").
The following year he entered the Society of Jesus; and feeling that the practice of poetry was too individualistic and self-indulgent for a Jesuit priest committed to the deliberate sacrifice of personal ambition, he burned his early poems.
Not until he studied the writings of Duns Scotus in 1872 did he decide that his poetry might not necessarily conflict with Jesuit principles.
With a few exceptions, Hopkins's poems were not published during his lifetime; they were read only by friends and fellow poets. After his death his friend the poet laureate Robert Bridges anthologized a selection of Hopkins's work. The first collected edition was published in 1918; a second, complete, edition appeared in 1930, whereupon his work received due recognition.
But who or what was Duns Scotus?
Let me tell you:
The blessed John Duns Scotus, O.F.M (c. 1266 – November 8, 1308) was one of the most important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages (the others being Aquinas, Ockham and Bonaventura).
He was nicknamed 'Doctor Subtilis' for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought.
Scotus has had considerable influence on Roman Catholic thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the "univocity of being", that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists, the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing, and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that
makes it an individual.
Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate conception of Mary.
(From Wikipedia)
Now you know!
