Dappled Things

Abstract

In Spring Hopkins looks at the fresh beauty of a daytime world, but the only spiritual truth that such a world can figure is the truth of childhood innocence, ‘Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy’. When Hopkins wishes to figure the truths of adult experience, he looks at a night landscape, a landscape in which nature’s ‘stained veined variety’ is obscured, and the eye, undistracted, can turn inwards to contemplate the grating of ‘thoughts against thoughts’. To look at nature is to be distracted, too, from death. Nature is everywhere vital: ‘weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush’. The blue daytime sky, ‘all in a rush’, distracts us from our mortality. Night-time reminds us that man is a spark in the darkness that flashes momentarily, and is then ‘in an enormous dark/Drowned’: