The third panting stanza rises from the monstrous waves of the sea on the wings of a dove to another white vital sign of the Lord, the living sign of the Eucharist.

The f's in the opening lines sound vicious almost ferocious. The line break leaves your catching your breathe before, that is right, a chasm. Perhaps it is the chasm of th eunknown or maybe the gapping space that can open beneath your feet in a such a moment of abandonment as the speaker has just experienced. When you give your all to God, He takes it. Then there you are with nothing. The desolation that can fall on the heels of assent is often what tries to prevent us from giving our yes in the first place. The enormity of the speaker's gift crashes in on him. There is no place to hide that is not given over. The hurtle of hell opens and the speaker gasps for air in the next line, which expresses his breathelessness and his distress. (like the Gusher song, Coming Up for Air)(How little is it to ask for a place to exist?) Yet, it is indeed a great deal, since the poet is also looking for an exsistential answer, a place to fit in the universe, a One to orientate himself to, a Where for his Whatness.

His question allows him to move from the unformed chaos of ocean metaphors, to the lightness of bird images. The speaker moves on the wings of a bird, with the precise homing sense of a pigeon, the speed of an eagle from one height to another. The stanza ends solidly with a "towering" mountain image, spiritually speaking . For, now the speaker is reaping the glorious benefits of his purification with a subsequent ascent into a towering new graces, briallantly alive with a new life in God. His rush upwards is not like the laborious movments you might expect when going from the ocean to the sky, or from a state of unknowning into the clarity of love and knowledge. It doesn't seem to take any time at all. It is over in a flash. Did you catch how he moved? He fligns his heart. Doesn't it remind you of a spring fling? A fling of the heart? I may think of flinging a frisbee (and he is evoking that too) but what he wants us to remember is the love in it-- the total last gift of the heart. It is a fling of the heart to the heart of the host-- both the host of God's angels and the sacramental whiteness of the sacred Bread of God's Body.


The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
I whirled out wings that spell
And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,
To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

Laced with fire of stress

I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod;
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
Hard down with a horror of height:
And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

Here is the second stanza--- aflame with fearfulness of letting go. I love the diction, the words of struggle and restriction like -strain, stress, walls, hard, down, lightning, night; words of intimacy and emotional impact like swoon, leaning, heart, heardst me, knowest (in a secret surprising way); words of a willed resignation and oblation like "did say yes," altar, confess, fire.

Is this stanza too unruly? Un-English? I think that is a fun question and I would say it is unruly and perhaps de-structured linguistically but not to destroy but to enter into the whirl of the passionate moment of resignation amid trial, to feel the unsettled omnipresence of the Divine within the "horror of height" a battle of the spirit against an inner resistance. Despite the disorderliness of the emotional state presented here the speaker still has a yes to say that is "truer than tongue."

Did you catch the nautical reference at the end of this one? Augurs well for his main subject of a ship-wreck and puts the speaker with those Fransicans saying yes before the viod of the sea. If you feel a little sea sick too, grammatically speaking, I think that is part of the plan as well. His tale will not be for the faint of heart in any sense.

Some other favorite poems-- just for the curious.
https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~gbrandal/Illum_html/hound.html
http://www.bartleby.com/101/679.html
http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/054001.htm

Poem of the Day

I thought of Frost's Mending Wall as a very viable option. I recently heard a very fun idea about a movie based on that something in us that doesn't love a wall ... and that nameless force working it own will in the poem.



However, Hopkins' rather long poem about the valiant struggle and happy memory of the death of 5 Fransicans won the day. Here it is in full text:



I love the child-like wonder he brings to his consideration of man's place in the universe.

First with the physicality of his creation description and then with the sweetness of wanting to hold the finger of God like a very small girl whose hand is too small to hold the giant hand of an adult and can just grasp their finger.



I might do a stanza my stanza meditation on it for Poetry Month.. we will have to see waht tomorrow brings.

http://www.bartleby.com/122/4.html

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