He's the best !

It's known GMH is unspeakably brilliant you don't need me for that it's so warm, reassuring to read these and rediscover where others have pinched lines. Contemporary highlight is the first stanza of The Lantern out of Doors -
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

which gives the title for the wonderful Seán Hewitt's just-released memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. I don't think it's too much a stretch to call Gerard a progenitor of queer aesthetics in poetry & I think one has only to look at what we're cautiously calling something like a Scottish revival at the moment to recognise the Hopkins in queer joy, in the unavoidably queer aesthetics of complexity, eruption, exuberance. This reread really rekindled the Deutschland for me which I Liked before but Oh my I am falling for it Heavy now what a masterpiece

Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,
With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky way,
What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?


Also the Heraclitean Fire poem is,,,, so desirable

O I suppose I'd also say I read the prose here the journal is quite sweet quite Wordsworthian in a way though GMH would dislike that comparison. There's an odd Socratic dialogue among Oxonians about What is Beauty which nearly worked though I was mostly going hmmm homoeroticism. I was surprised by his letters to John Henry Newman which to my shame I didn't know existed! they're curious!

He's endless he's here to stay and Thank the Lord for that
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.