Notesale: Turn your study into money

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SPRING

Nothing is so beautiful as SpringWhen weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness, the racing lambs too have fair their fling
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- Have, get, before it cloy
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Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning
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He is regarded by
different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, and melancholy
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Pertinent question/Pre-reading activities
If you had to create a perfect world, what would it look like? If you could remove one thing from this
world to make it better what would it be and why?
General discussion
The speaker declares that nothing is as beautiful as spring
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In the first octave the speaker celebrates the beauty of
nature and the profound effect it has on man
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The celebration of beauty is also closely linked with his contemplation of theology and the act of prayer
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This indicates the fact that the
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natural world provides a means of entering into an experience of God
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It has fourteen lines and is divided into an octave and a
sestet
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As is typical with an Italian sonnet, a change from one rhyme group to another signifies a change in
subject matter
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It is at the Volta that the second idea is introduced
Hopkins typically uses the octave to present some account of personal or sensory experience and then
employs the sestet for philosophical reflection
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The sestet is introduced with a question about the meaning of the beauty and then the speaker
moves on to a more direct interaction between himself and God in the form of a prayer and a wish to
shelter the beauty and innocence of childhood from sin
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One of his mayor innovations was a new
metrical form, called "sprung rhythm"
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As opposed to syllabic meters (such as the iambic), which count both stresses and syllables,
this form allows for greater freedom in the position and proportion of stresses
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So instead of composing
all his lines in the ordinary iambic rhythm: da DUM da DUM da-DUM da DUM, he uses
irregular rhythms, e
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line 9:
What is all this juice and all this joy?
(da DUM DUM DUM DUM da DUM DUM DUM)
By clustering those stressed syllables together, it loads the line with a sense of emotional intensity and
makes it harder to dismiss the question as vague or rhetorical
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In the octave the tone is c

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