Glory be to God for dappled things? For skies of couple-colour as a brinded2 cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls,3 finches' wings; 5 Landscape plotted and pieced?fold, fallow, and plough;4 And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.0 equipment
All things counter, original, spare,5 strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; io He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.
1877 1918
1. Kestrel, a small falcon noted for hovering in the air. 2. A prince who is heir to the French throne. 3. Rippling. 'Rung upon the rein': circled at the end of a rein. 4. The verb can be read as imperative or indicative. All three meanings are relevant: to prepare for action, to fasten together, to collapse. 5. The ridge between two furrows of a plowed field.
6. Break the surface of. 1. Of two or more colors in blotches, variegated. 2. Brownish orange in color with streaks of gray. 3. I.e., freshly fallen chestnuts, bright as coals. 4. Divided into fields used as pastures ('fold'), lying fallow, or plowed for cultivation. The landscape thus appears like patches of different colors. 5. Rare. 'Counter': contrary.
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BINSEY POPLARS / 15 19
Hurrahing in Harvest
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks1 rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
5 I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
10 Majestic?as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!? These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
1877 1918
Binsey Poplars
felled 1879
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank 5 Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
io O if we but knew what we do When we delve0 or hew? dig Hack and rack0 the growing green! torture Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender, is That, like this sleek and seeing ball0 the eye But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve:
20 After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve0 rob of self
1. Sheaves of grain.
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15 18 / GERAR D MANLE Y HOPKIN S 25The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene. 1879 1918
Duns Scotus's Oxford1
Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river- rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped and poised powers;
Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded Best in;2 graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural rural keeping?folk, flocks, and flowers.
Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
10 He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;
Of realty' the rarest-veined unraveller; a not reality Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece; Who fired France for Mary without spot.3
1879 1918
Felix Randal
Felix Randal the farrier,' O is he dead then? my duty blacksmith
all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
5 Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed1 and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom2 Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever3 he offended!
1. Duns Scotus, the medieval theologian, lectured powers'), with the 'there' of its new surburban at Oxford
