I can identify with the urge to talk back to favorite poets, to soothe their anxieties, reassure them, or question some of their actions (wouldn't it have been better if they were perfect?). But in the long run, what I hear is not the subject's voice, but the speaker's. That is the only way it can be: the speaker is not the subject. Yet for me the fierceness, inconsolability, single-mindedness of the original poets is the only way they could be. To wish them otherwise is to wish them not to be the way they were, and who knows what might be lost that way? This is a comforting and well-made poem, but to me it does not capture Hopkins' spirit.
Susan
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