for Christmas this year. Karen is a fellow contributor to her.meneutics, the Christianity Today women\u2019s blog, and she is also the head of the English department at Liberty University. Although her faith comes through in this book, I would recommend it for anyone who loves good literature. This book is part spiritual memoir and part really engaging English class. I asked Karen to contribute an excerpt from my favorite chapter. The excerpt appears below. I hope you\u2019ll read it and join me in giving it to many. And if you leave a comment on this post, I will enter you in a drawing to receive a free copy:<\/em><\/p>\n\u2026I loved summer, but I loved going back to school, too.<\/p>\n
I especially loved getting new school clothes each fall. So I flipped through the new catalog gazing lovingly at each page in the Junior Miss section, playing my regular game of picking out the one thing\u2014just one!\u2014on each page that I liked best. This summer, when I got to the end of the Junior Miss section, I saw another section that I\u2019d never seen before. It was called \u201cPretty Plus.\u201d I wasn\u2019t sure what this was, but the clothes looked similar to those I\u2019d seen on the previous pages, if plainer, so I continued looking. The section had only three or four pages, but by the time I got to the end of it, my heart had dropped into my belly. These were clothes for girls my age\u2014but girls of a bigger size. And the more I looked at the models, the more I could not deny what I had recognized right away but didn\u2019t want to see: they looked like me. Yes, I was \u201cPretty Plus,\u201d and I was overwhelmed with a sense of shame I\u2019d never felt before.<\/p>\n
That was the year I started writing poetry.<\/p>\n
Most of the poetry, maybe all of it, was about horses. Most of it, maybe all of it, was pretty bad.<\/p>\n
. . .<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until many years later\u2014years after reading nursery rhymes, followed by silly limericks, then poems by Robert Frost and Edgar Allan Poe, and then Shakespeare\u2014that I first encountered the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins\u2019 poetry is odd and beautiful; its beauty, in fact, comes from its strange words, sounds, and images. I think it\u2019s fair to say that if it weren\u2019t for Hopkins\u2019 own sense of not quite fitting in, his poetry would not be so powerful. Like mine, it might never have even been written if not for his pain.<\/p>\n
Unlike my poetry, however, Hopkins\u2019 poetry was good. Really good. But he didn\u2019t think so. He even burned it all once. It wasn\u2019t that he thought his poetry was badly-written; it\u2019s just that he thought he shouldn\u2019t write poetry at all.<\/p>\n
Hopkins, a convert to Roman Catholicism, fought most of his life against the body: against his body, against the body of his poetic works, and against bodily desires he didn\u2019t want to have. His body was small, delicately-featured, and often sick; he mistakenly thought that writing poetry would distract him from the spiritual life; and he felt a sexual desire for men, the indulgence of which would be contrary to the teachings of the church.<\/p>\n
Shortly after deciding to pursue the priesthood, a refuge, perhaps, against the storm of desires, Hopkins built a bonfire for his poems. Like his passions, the poems burned and then, seemingly, were gone.<\/p>\n
. . .<\/p>\n
It was the church that helped correct Hopkins\u2019 errant view that his pursuit of poetry and a religious vocation were incompatible. After burning his poems, he didn\u2019t write any more poetry for many years, but sometime after he had taken his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Jesuit priest, his religious superior asked him to write a poem to commemorate the sinking of a ship which had claimed many lives, including those of several nuns. After doing so, Hopkins began writing poetry again. Yet, the world was not permitted to see these works of beauty and would not until after his death from typhoid fever at age 48. His embrace of poetry was, sadly, awkward still. He fought his poetic desires like he fought his bodily ones. But these are not battles that are always easily won. Sometimes, perhaps, they are not battles that can be won.<\/p>\n
In his effort to quell the call of all fleshly desires\u2014and is not poetry, with its sounds, rhythms, and images a kind of fleshly desire?\u2014Hopkins had resisted not only poetry but with it beauty, tied as it is, in most ways of thinking, to the physical world. But beauty\u2014like truth and goodness\u2014will out. Beauty is so powerful that it erupts even in the most unlikely of places. Awkward places, too.<\/p>\n
One of Hopkins\u2019 loveliest poems is about this kind of beauty, \u201cPied Beauty.\u201d It goes like this:<\/p>\n
Glory be to God for dappled things\u2014<\/p>\n
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;<\/p>\n
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;<\/p>\n
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches\u2019 wings;<\/p>\n
Landscape plotted and pieced\u2014fold, fallow, and plough;<\/p>\n
And \u00e1ll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.<\/p>\n
All things counter, original, sp\u00e1re, strange; .<\/p>\n
Whatever is fickle, freckl\u00e8d (who knows how?)<\/p>\n
With sw\u00edft, sl\u00f3w; sweet, s\u00f3ur; ad\u00e1zzle, d\u00edm;<\/p>\n
He fathers-forth whose beauty is p\u00e1st change:<\/p>\n
Pr\u00e1ise h\u00edm.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s as impossible to paraphrase a poem as it is to paraphrase a person. But like beautiful and interesting people, beautiful and interesting poems beg examination.<\/p>\n
Pied <\/em>means patched<\/em> or splotchy in color.<\/em> The title is an oxymoron, for beauty is not traditionally associated with the patched or splotchy things. Or the freckled or big-bellied things. The poem is filled with words and images evoking the beauty of such\u2014things both natural and manmade that aren\u2019t smooth, uniform, or even, the qualities traditionally associated with beauty. The poem is a celebration of the awkward things: rose-moles, pieced land, gear and tackle and trim, and brindled cows.<\/p>\nWe once had a Boxer of brindle color, rich, honeyed brown streaked with black. A birth defect resulted in the eventual removal of her deformed front leg. We named this awkward, three-legged creature Gracie. She was strong and muscular and loved to drink water right out of the spigot. I would caress the dimpled place where her leg used to be and think about how beautiful she was in her bold asymmetry. I loved her more than I have loved any animal in the world, and more than most people. We used to take her everywhere, and everyone else loved her, too. Often, after seeing Gracie run and play with as much passion and agility as any four-legged pup, people would begin to tell us stories of disability, sometimes their own, sometimes someone else\u2019s. They would tell of an accident, or illness, or war scene, all the while scratching Gracie\u2019s ears or the scruff of her neck. They would tell of victory and overcoming and joy, too. When Gracie died from a tick borne disease when she was only six, we got a new dog right away to try to fill the hole she left in our lives, but I couldn\u2019t stop crying for her for a year.<\/p>\n
Gracie\u2019s short, irregular life brought unexpected beauty into the world. This is what Hopkins\u2019 poem \u201cPied Beauty\u201d is about. And what it is, too. Not only does its content celebrate the beauty of \u201call things counter\u201d and \u201cstrange,\u201d but the form of the poem itself is irregular, from the new words Hopkins creates out of strange combinations (\u201cfathers-forth\u201d) to his invented pattern of sound using \u201csprung rhythm,\u201d to the very structure of the poem. The structure mimics a sonnet, but then breaks all the rules of the form, none more dramatically than the abrupt, foreshortened end of the poem with the two sudden words of finality, \u201cPraise him.\u201d Praise him, the poems asks\u2014no, commands\u2014for the awkward things: the fickle, the freckled, the big teeth, the three-legged dogs, the girls that act like boys, and those that are \u201cPretty Plus.\u201d\u00a0 There is, the poem reminds us, a certain kind of beauty that arises only from imperfection\u2014or pain.<\/p>\n
(Again, leave a comment on this post and we\u2019ll have another book giveaway. Winner announced on Friday, December 7)<\/em><\/p>\nUPDATE: Annette, you are the winner of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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