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Hopkins: Poetry and Nature
The name of our press is inspired by the opening lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s extraordinary sonnet, ‘The Caged Skylark’: As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells – That bird beyond the remembering his free fells; This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life’s age. In Victorian …
Auguries of Innocence
Listen to ‘Auguries of Innocence’ by William Blake, read by Paul O’Prey: Reading the opening lines of Blake’s great invocation to see and cherish the whole universe as a single, living being, I find myself thinking of Robert Macfarlane’s timely reminder, that ‘wonder is an essential survival skill for the Anthropocene’. Blake is the master …
Halcyon Days
By my reckoning of the calendar, Storm Bella, which shook the British Isles with hundred mile an hour winds on 27 December, was right on schedule, or perhaps a day early. Halcyon Days traditionally run for seven days either side of the Winter Solstice, a period of calm decreed by ancient gods to allow kingfishers …
