I’m reading a biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my very favorite poets. I’m normally not a biography person– I read maybe one a year– but Hopkins is one of those people I think about all the time. I love him b/c he made up a kind of poetry that is basically perfect in its rhythms and meters and trippling precise consonants like in “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,” but also b/c he was the sort of person who looks around at the world and finds it so brilliant as to be almost an insult to God, and I think sometimes I am also this kind of person.

In a letter to a friend, he once wrote that Goethe had gotten it all wrong, that Faust’s trials weren’t tempting enough to be plausible. Looking at the beer halls and women in the story, he asks why Mephistopheles doesn’t offer instead “the subtle charms of poetry, music, and art” or “the beauties of nature?” (Hopkins, of course, made the mistake we all make: to think that what we love individually is the only thing worth loving.)

Later, he burned all his poems before entering the Jesuit priesthood, his own best sacrifice. He cannot stay away, though, and the failure to dedicate himself solely to God seems to cauterize him, even as his poems become less acrobatic (more humble?) and he addresses them heavenward:

Let me be to Thee as the circling bird,
Or bat with tender and air-crisping wings
That shapes in half-light his departing rings,
From both of whom a changeless note is heard.
I have found my music in a common word,
Trying each pleasurable throat that sings
And every praised sequence of sweet strings,
And know infallibly which I preferred.

The authentic cadence was discovered late
Which ends those only strains that I approve,
And other science all gone out of date
And minor sweetness scarce made mention of:
I have found the dominant of my range and state -
Love, O my God, to call Thee Love and Love.

This is what I think I about today, despite however many pink hearts and cheap candy and obnoxious movies: how at the end of his life, he wrote “I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decrees / Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; /Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse,” how even then, they say he died crying, “I am so happy, I am so happy.”

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