It is indeed a splendid reading, Carl. Who is the reader? He reads these complex, idiosyncratic verses with intelligence and clarity, managing to deliver even the histrionic pitch of a great many passages in an effective fashion within the overall arc of the reading.
There was a period in my professional life – now several decades ago – when I quite frequently found myself teaching Hopkins. This was when I worked in Liverpool, a city where Hopkins had served in the 1880s. Liverpool, as many will know, is a city marked by divisions between the Protestant and Catholic faiths. The vast influx of desperate people from Ireland in the wake of the Irish Famine, most of them Catholics, magnified the divisions that already existed, forcing changes in the patterns of residence and occupation on and around the Mersey. Partly as a result of this, in Hopkins’s time the city was also marked by a great gulf between those living in persistent poverty and those who were comfortably off or indeed wealthy, a history whose distant consequences are evident in Liverpool to this day. The intermittent occurrence throughout the nineteenth century of sectarian riots in the city strongly influenced the establishment across the whole of England – matters were differently managed in the other parts of the United Kingdom, though the issues were much the same – of the pattern of secular and religious schools which, in modified form, persists to the present.
Pitching this poem and others by Hopkins to adult students who, as it happened, were mostly either from the Protestant side of the divide or who, for whatever personal reasons, stood somewhat aloof from it, was – let us say – an interesting exercise.
Hopkins’s poetry became generally known only long after his death. His poems were first published in book-form in 1918, twenty-nine years later, in a volume edited by Robert Bridges. In 1930, Oxford University Press put out an enlarged collection, edited by Charles Williams. He was the earliest poet included in Michael Roberts’s influential 1936 anthology, The Faber Book of Modern Verse.
Thanks for posting this link, Carl. I entirely agree with you about the hideous animation.
Clive
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