W. H. Gardner

I have only completed a selection of poetry:

The Windhover
God's Grandeur
Pied Beauty
The Caged Skylark
Carrion Comfort
No worst
The Wreck of the Deutschland

I enjoyed the poet's style and use of stanzas; most poems were short. Many were about his spiritual struggles or emotional conflicts. His poetry was similar to King David's of the Old Testament who also wrestled with contradictory feuds between personal defeat and victory, despair and encouragement, and anxiety and peace.… (more)

You either love him or hate him. I love him, and recall being most indignant when Brigid Brophy included him in “Fifty Works of English Literature we could Do Without”. Who now reads Ms Brophy….? I love both the magical, dazzling, sometimes hard-to-follow words, and the thought behind them: that I am a jack, joke, poor potsherd, yet an immortal diamond, that each hung bell’s bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name, that I am soft sift, yet steady as water in a well. Hopkins was an early warning on eco-destruction: “the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod”; “O if we but knew what we do when we delve or hew – hack and rack the growing green”; “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet”. His nature observations are precise and accurate. Priest and celibate he was, but the rhythm of his grimmer sonnets kept running through my head whilst I was in labour: “No worst, there is none”; “Patience, hard thing”. Favourites: “I am soft sift” and “I kiss my hand” (yes, let’s go OTT!) from “Wreck of the Deutschland”; “God’s Grandeur”; “The Starlight Night”; “Spring”; “The Windhover”; “Binsey Poplars”; “Inversnaid”; “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”; “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire”, and “Ash-boughs”.… (more)