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 inspired by images in his poetry. It comes from the poem ‘The Handsome Heart’:
Heart to its own fine function, | wild and self-instressed,
Falls as light…
Much poetry is difficult to grasp if you rely only on logical thinking, and Hopkins especially so. I cannot tell you exactly what these lines mean; my response to them is intuitive. The word ’self-instressed’ probably means something like ‘self-energized’ (the word ‘instressed’ is Hopkins’ invention), but knowing the meaning of that one obscure word is not enough to explain the rest of those lines.
Attempts to precisely define the meaning of poetry in any case often undermine its beauty, and risk losing sight of meaning altogether. (This is not surprising when you consider that meaning is perceived by the intuitive right side of the brain rather than the analytical left brain, as psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher Iain McGilchrist has pointed out.)
As with poetry, so with music. Although I wrote this music myself, I cannot tell you exactly what it means; I can only say that the words ‘heart’, ‘falls’ and ‘light’ – the key words in those lines by Hopkins – all have multiple associations in my mind (as they surely do in everybody’s), that when the words are combined the way Hopkins has, they bring up even more associations, suggestions and implications, and that this music resonates (at least in my mind) with those associations.
The second work in the series of compositions inspired by images in the poetry of Hopkins (the only other one completed so far) is Immortal Diamond.
Those two words memorably conclude Hopkins’ poem ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection’ (see the full poem below). I wrote this music with those concluding words and all they might represent in the back of my mind, and also to some extent (like Hopkins, I suspect) the qualities of a literal diamond, its facets and angles, its purity and clarity, and how these qualities might be reflected in a metaphorical, ‘immortal’, diamond.
The ‘Heraclitean fire’ of the poem’s title refers to the teachings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who wrote that the world (or cosmos) is an ‘ever-living fire kindling in measures and being extinguished in measures’, that ‘all things are an equal exchange for fire, and fire for all things’. In Heraclitus’s philosophy, change is constant, and fire symbolises, amongst other things, the flickering flame of impermanence*.
But it’s not necessary either to understand ancient Greek philosophy or to share Hopkins’ Christian faith in order to appreciate the beauty and deeper meaning of this poem, or to sense intuitively what the words ‘immortal diamond’ conjure up.
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
(The cover image for Immortal Diamond is a detail from one of the paintings Carl Jung made in his journal now known as the Red Book.)
I’m now working on more music inspired by images in Hopkins’ poetry.
Neil Buckland
* For a discussion of possible meanings of ‘Heraclitean fire’ and the relationship between this and Hopkins’ Christian beliefs see https://philosophy.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/122/2013/10/4-Hopkins.pdf
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