Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins - selected and edited by W. H. Gardner

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 show more 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”. show less

I'm not at all religious, but there is just something very uplifting about Hopkin's poetry - especially when I first read him in my teens. He has still got it for me, though.

Hopkins is my favorite poet of all time. Especially good if you're depressed. Well, he has some of the most depressed poms I know of. Maybe not good to read when you're too depressed.

An absolutely fascinating poet, whose mind I am still attempting to wrap myself around.