46. Some beauty hurts

Gretchen Primack’s Poetry Month Pick, April 11, 2013

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Moonrise

I awoke in the Midsummer not-to-call night, ‚ in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe ‚ of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, ‚ lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, ‚ of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, ‚ entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, ‚ unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, ‚ eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

Note: ‘Moonrise. June 19, 1876.’ H. Note at foot shows intention to rewrite with one stress more in the second half of each line, and the first is thus rewritten ‘in the white of the dusk, in the walk of the morning’. 

Hier deutsch von Hans Arnfrid Astel

Gretchen Primack Comments:
Some beauty hurts. A concerto so gorgeous it makes you wince, for instance; an oil painting that presses your stomach down. “Don’t cry, it’s only music,” starts Liesl Mueller’s poem “Joy.” Trying to name the ache of beauty, she writes,

…It’s about
two seemingly parallel lines
suddenly coming together
inside us, in some place
that is still wilderness.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ music is the most beautiful I’ve ever heard in poetry. He is the master of sound (though Plath sits at his right hand). And the pleasure is so deep that it leaves me a little creased where, as Mueller would say, those parallel lines suddenly come together.