The River Rover
With apologies to Gerard our Poet
Article voiceover
I spied this morning morning’s magus, flow-
state of sunlight’s orphan, supple-sun-swum Gander, in his swimming
Of the pouring blending deep below him swirling flow, and brimming
Low there, how he sung in answer to the shriek of a strident crow
In his buoyancy! then on, on current go,
As a velvet thorn wheels round on a rose-rise: the hull and chimming
Cross-cast the wide wake. My thoughts were humming
Howl for a fowl, — the alert of, the mystery of the show!
Svelte slyness and calmness and strength, oh, stream, dream, down, there
Angle! AND the water that glides from thee then, the infinite
Frames filmed humbler, more aqueous, O my savoir faire!
No magic of it: róugh rów makes murk scum suet
Gleam, and orange-black mirrors of the air
Splash, mash the sun and this strange wild planet.
I know 'Th Windhover' by heart and the sheer fun and inventiveness of your piece made my smile.
You've got his rhythms exactly. People say that his secret is sprung rhythm, where you only count the stressed syllables. And he himself seems to suggest that's the case. But in fact it's much more complicated than that, and probably relates to Hopkins' Welsh ancestry. I think the reason for the sheer magic of his rhythms is the double stress which is then surrounded by a lot of unstressed syllables - uuu//uuu - in that sort of way. It actually gives a feeling of flying, or leaping, or springing. It's something you commonly find in Welsh poetry. But is very difficult for anybody but the Welsh to master, it seems. I've certainly never managed it. The nearest I can get to a double stress is when the last syllable of a line falls on a stress and the first syllable of the next line falls on a stress. But for some reason it doesn't seem to have quite the same magic.