My previous post incites me to quote some poetry, so here goes. In my first year of Uni (in Zimbabwe – our University College was affiliated to London), I studied Classics, French, and English Literature.
A pox on whoever thought up the curriculum for English Literature that year. We were condemned to study Wuthering Heights, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Mill on the Floss all in one year! Any one of those alone would have been enough to cast a blight on the year’s study, but all three – well it’s a wonder we didn’t all rush off and drown ourselves in the nearest lake. Come to think of it, there aren’t many lakes near Harare, which may have been the reason so many of us survived.
Fortunately, we had a brilliant Classics Professor, Tom Carney, who had been a boxer in one of his lives. Tom knew how to make HIS subject live, and his delivery in class had all the punch of his former career. So we all looked forward to our time with him, as a break from struggling through the maladies of English Lit.
There was one small gem that I managed to carry away from the English Literature course. Some of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I can remember with surprise and delight finding out how different his poetry was from the genre of his time in 19th century England. One of the first poetic innovators, he produced a racy, woven tapestry of words that nowhere more fits his theme than in his poem The Windhover. I commtted it to memory and think of it every time I see a hawk, which is often. So here it is:
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! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins.
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While I was dealing with the 
