Gerard Manley Hopkins

This is the most bizarre blog. No one ever reads it (well, no one that I know personally, anyway). No one knows that I write it. I don't reveal the complexities of what actually happens in my outside life in it, out of respect or courtesy to others and also out of fear of exposure concerning my owns thoughts and desires. So in one sense it is cut off, detached, superficial, with odd little poems and songs that affect me bumping up through it, spiced (or dulled) by what other people have said about me (a.k.a. reviews or interviews) and the occasional artistic rant or observation.

All of these things are detached and don't do more than skim at the real person, but I suppose all biography is like that, auto- or other. Yet I wonder whether these snippets of thoughts, of music and butterfly theories, of some things that moves me - add up to anything real at all.

Does anything ever add up to anything real?

I love this poem the way I love the poem "Snow" by Louis MacNeice. And the way I love "Theme from a Summer's Place" and the song "I Melt With You". With all my heart.

"Pied Beauty"

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins