Haiku Hopscotch

Hey world. This week I've got a gorgeous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that is just bursting with colours: Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. This poem is such a fantastic celebration of life and imperfection. As you'll note, none of the things listed in the poem are flawless. Here Gerard Manley Hopkins creates a pied collection of minor things that today I feel that people overlook or simply don't notice, instead we are all looking at one screen or another. See, ...

Hey world, Following on from the previous post where I discussed Keats's theory of Negative Capability and what exactly it meant, I am now going to look at and analyse seemingly the only poem of his where critics agree that we can observe the application of his theory. Critics suggest that his 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' is the best available example of the poet actually exercising the elusive 'negative capability' of which he wrote. The reader can see this in the way he poses questions to the 'silent form', interrogating whatever meaning it might convey rather than communicating his knowledge of the subject. Knowledge is just the notion that Keats urges us to forget about when considering the concept of negative Capability. Remeber- '... a life of sensation rather than thought.' Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than...