The Fredösphere

I'm watching the kids over my lunch hour while the wifeösphere takes care of some business, so I'm blogging remotely, using pen and paper, what you might call a mature technology.  I suppose when I'm done writing this, I'll have a delivery boy haul it via bicycle to a coding clerk who will transcribe it onto IBM punch cards, which will be sent via pneumatic tube to a UNIVAC facility, wherein the elegant stream of ones and zeros will be recorded onto handy ten-inch reels of nine-track tapes, which will be placed in a diplomatic pouch to Los Angeles, where the spirit of Orson Wells will read the text aloud and his voice will be captured on a vinyl record, after which ... well, I'll let you have the fun of finishing this.

The search for texts for future choral compositions continues.  I was working my way through yet another poetry anthology -- a particularly unpromising one -- when I found myself marking three poems in a row for further consideration.  They were all by Gerald Manley Hopkins.  Saaaaay, why does that name sound familiar?  Maybe because a helpful visitor named "Danny" left a comment suggesting I look at that very poet.  Thanks; I'll stop procrastinating and get right on it.

Hopkins seems odd and experimental for a 19th century poet, if this example is representative:

The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom
    of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy then off, off forth on swing.
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend:  the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind.  My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle, AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

    No wonder of it:  shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

I guess it must be religious, given the dedication.  Beyond that, I'm pretty sure it is about a bird.  Otherwise, it is getting close to glossolalia.  Strangely compelling glossolalia.  I can hear opportunities for word play and note play.  Maybe a post-minimalist approach would work.  Anyway, I'll be thinking a lot more about ol' Gerald Manley Hopkins.