The comparison between the kestrel or ‘windhover’ and Christ arises out of Hopkins’s deeply felt Christianity (he was a Jesuit), and the poet’s breathless exhilaration at sighting the bird is brilliantly captured by Hopkins’s distinctive ‘sprung rhythm’.ĩ. He wrote it in 1877, during a golden era of creativity for the poet, while he was living in Wales. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) thought ‘The Windhover’ the best thing he ever wrote. So begins this brilliant take on the sonnet. Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,Īs a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-ĭom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Hope, for Dickinson, sings its wordless tune and never stops singing it: nothing can faze it.Ĩ. Emily Dickinson, ‘ “Hope” is the thing with feathers’.Īs with many of her poems, Emily Dickinson here takes an abstract feeling or idea – in this case, hope – and likens it to something physical, visible, and tangible – a singing bird. ‘Pigeons’ offers something very different from Henry’s contemporaries, whether Keats or Tennyson or even Browning.ħ. James Henry (1798-1876) was overlooked during his lifetime and it was only more than a century after his death that his work was discovered. Must smoke ere noon upon the parson’s table …Īs an opening line for a nineteenth-century poem, ‘By what mistake were pigeons made so happy’ stands out for its directness, its sheer oddness, and its unusual choice of subject-matter (doves in poetry, why yes pigeons? Um…). Till at its throat the knife, and pigeon pie The pigeon sole has free board and free quarters, So little meddled with? say, a collared dog,Īnd hard worked ox, and horse still harder worked,Īnd caged canary, why, uncribbed, unmaimed, ![]() So little with the affairs of others meddling, So plump and fat and sleek and well content, ![]() We have analysed this poem here.īy what mistake were pigeons made so happy, Keats uses the nightingale as a way of talking about death, annihilation, immortality, and, indeed, his own feelings about these subjects – the nightingale being a common symbol for the poet. ![]() (In the same account, he wrote the entire thing in one morning!) John Keats (1795-1821) wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, one of his most celebrated poems, in Hampstead in 1819 – sitting under a plum tree, according to one account. The voice I hear this passing night was heard paperback $18.Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain. Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. Bird language that flies to places I’ve never been.” What unfolds is an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy exploring the relentless physical and existential struggles against power and gendered violence in “the eternal void of grief” (Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine). I wanted to become a translator of bird language. In her new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an “I-do-bird-sequence,” where “Bird-human is the ‘I.’” Her remarkable essay “Bird Rider” explains: “I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. This book is about the realization of / I-thought-bird-was-part-of-me-but-Iwas-part-of-bird sequence / It’s a delayed record of such a sequence.Īn iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. Included in the Holiday Catalog catalog Phantom Pain Wings Poetry by Kim Hyesoon
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