Intensity, Plenty Of

I've been spending quite a bit of time lately in the company of Gerard Manley Hopkins, as mediated through his poetry, and I'm rather glad it's time to move on having just read every extant line of it. Every moment of the experience has been in some sense rewarding, but often overwhelmingly so. His verse is just so packed, so dense; at times each line is like its own small explosion. And my goodness is he obsessional, wonderfully so, but you can only take so much of it.

When I said 'quite a bit of time' I really should qualify that: three poems a day was just about the maximum, and when you come to something like Tom's Garland really you'd need a week to wrest any kind of coherent meaning out of it. Fortunately my edition gives Hopkins's own gloss on it (I think done to help Dixon or Bridges or one of those coves) and I settled for a couple of read-throughs of the poem followed by a couple of readings of the gloss and then a final reading aloud of the poem, at which point things were starting to make sense. (Although, curiously, I think I had a pretty good idea of what was on Hopkins's mind even on a first reading. But I didn't get the animus against levellers and their like as expressed in the prose.) 

Anyway now I'm moving on into the Prose selection and since I've not read much Hopkins at all in this vein I'm looking forward to it. The conventionally Catholic devotional bits I suspect will be eerily familiar. It's nice to visit home once in a while.