Hopkins, The Heart Falls as Light, and Immortal Diamond
The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is far too musical in itself to need setting to music, by me or anyone else. Consider the beginning of ‘The Windhover’: I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! or lines like ‘the sunlight sidled… like dandled diamonds’ or ‘the glass-blue days are those when every colour glows’. I have taken another line from a poem by Hopkins (strictly speaking, two lines with a few words omitted), ‘the heart falls as light’, as the title of the first of a new series of instrumental compositions [...]