Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

On A Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People A Brother and Sister By Gerard Manley Hopkins O I admire and sorrow! The heart’s eye grieves Discovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years. A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves, And beauty’s dearest veriest vein is tears. Happy the father, mother of these! Too fast: Not that, but thus far, all with frailty, blest In one fair fall; but, for time’s aftercast, Creatures all heft, hope, hazard, interest. And are they thus? The fine, the fingering beams Their young delightful hour do feature down That fleeted else like day-dissolvèd dreams Or ringlet-race on burling Barrow brown. She leans on him with such contentment fond As well with sister sits, would well the wife; His looks, the soul’s own letters, see beyond, Gaze on, and fall directly forth on life. But ah, bright forelock, cluster that you are Of favoured make and mind and health and youth, Where lies your landmark, seamark, or soul’s star? There’s none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth. There’s none but good can be good, both for you And what sways with you, maybe this sweet maid; None good, but God — a warning wavèd to One once that was found wanting when Good weighed. Man lives that list, that leaning in the will No wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess, The selfless self of self, most strange, most still, Fast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes. Your feast of; that most in you earnest eye May but call on your banes to more carouse. Worst will the best. What worm was here, we cry, To have havoc-pocked so, see, the hung-heavenward boughs? Enough: corruption was the world’s first woe. What need I strain my heart beyond my ken? O but I bear my burning witness though Against the wild and wanton work of men. In the modern scholarly edition of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which appeared in 1990, the editor notes that in the preceding edition of 1948 a number of poems — eighty-two, in fact — were offered, after the preceding groups called “Early Poems” and “Poems,” as “Unfinished Poems, Fragments, Light Verse.” Those poems were sidelined, and so they were rarely anthologized, taught, or even read. Many of these apparently “lesser” pieces seemed to my young self — and still seem now — just as good as the poems honored in the front of the book. Although the new edition repaired this unfortunate editorial segregation by printing all the poems in chronological order, I still regret the relative obscurity of the “unfinished” poems. A late and ambitious one of them, called “On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People,” is worth pondering, not least to draw readers’ attention to its existence. It embodies the agony of Hopkins’ last years, in which he repeatedly staged a debate between his own theory of unbidden creativity and the religious theory of free will. At the age of twenty-two, Gerard Hopkins, an ardent young English poet and a recent graduate of Oxford (where he had shone as a brilliant student of the classics), prays that he may willingly advance beyond the legitimate pleasures of the senses in favor of the better joys of ascetic devotion. For the delight of the ear in song and speech, he will substitute contemplative silence and muteness in self-expression; instead of the distractions of worldly life, his eye will find “the uncreated light.” In gentle and unstrained “perfect” quatrains, each rhythmically serene line rhyming exactly with another, he enjoins the five natural senses to fix on spiritual pleasures. He begins the poem, which he calls “The Habit of Perfection,” with the ear and the eye: Elected Silence, sing to meAnd beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear. Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent. Be shellèd eyes, with double dark And find the uncreated light: This ruck and reel which you remark Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight. He burned his own copies of his youthful poems