Poetry Forum

It's been a long time since I wrote anything hence my absence from the forum. To try to get myself going again I went back to writing a kind of vilanelle, taking the refrain from another text and filling in my lines around them. In this case the text comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins and can be found on a plaque on the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh.


Scotland
after Gerard Manley Hopkins

Let them be left, O let them be left,
The bog and the slow-sucking wounds in the slough:
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.


Let it be known that I, prophet all purposeless,
Forfeit my books for the beauty of loneliness:
Let them be left, O let them be left.


Fired by whisky’s hot grasp on my throat,
I cry to the rocks in a drunken epiphany,
‘Long live the weeds and the wilderness!’ Yet,


As the hills must submit to the sea-lochs’ embrace,
So I must return to my filthy Jerusalem:
Let them be left, O let them be left,


The prayers which I buried with thorns on the shore,
Where the waves sing the psalm which the winds shall repeat:
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.


I have heard the wild spaces: in heather they said,
‘We are tide, we are time, we will never forget’:
Let them be left, O let them be left,
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Hail, infrequent visitor. Ave. Are you still Oxonian?

This seems like a very good exercise. Have you followed the full villanelle rhyming scheme? I'm not seeing a lot of rhyming beyond the Hopkins lines.

The effect is a sort of bardic crying on the wild shore. Quite high-flown, but not without effect.

Now, what will you do next?

Cheers

David

Yes, the middle lines of the triplets are perhaps a bit of a departure from the standard form, rhyme-wise. I couldn't quite work out whether it's a cry in support of Hopkins' original text, or an allegory for something more personal. Not that it matters a whole lot, it has a sesne of mood and passion about it which I like.

One mini-nit...

Wouldn't "Let it be known that I, prophet of all purposeless,..." make more sense? No? maybe not.

Anyway, I liked it - thought S1 was especially strong.

cheers
peter