This is a repeating event18 February 2027 6:00 pm
Gerard Manley Hopkins - Selected Poems
Event Details
Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the most distinctive voices in English poetry. The alliteration, assonance and powerful rhythm in his poems are striking. Hopkins had a keen sense of beauty, a love of nature and a deep Christian faith, but he was also tortured by doubt and depression. His poems are tender and ecstatic; they are filled with wonder, with fear, with surprise, with despair and with hope.
Bridging Romanticism and Modernism, Hopkins is one of the most original poets of the 19th Century. He developed his own prosody called “sprung rhythm”, a form of accentual verse that he felt was closer to the rhythm of the way people actually speak. At the same time, he pushed the limits of language:
“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!”from The Windhover
Please join us as we read and discuss together some of Hopkins’ most celebrated poems:
- God’s Grandeur
- Spring
- Pied Beauty
- Carrion Comfort
- Hurrahing in Harvest
- The Windhover
- The Starlight Night
and two of his dark sonnets:
- I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day
- My own heart let me more have pity on
JOINING DETAILS:
- Four-meeting study live on Zoom led by Sean Forester
- Thursdays 4, 11, 18 & 25 February, 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)
- £160 for four two-hour meetings
- The recommended edition of the poems is Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, Selected with an Introduction and Notes by W.H. Gardner, Penguin Books,2008, ISBN-13: 978-0-140-42015-9. Sean will also send out links to the individual poems we will study.
