crossref-it.info - AS/A2 English Literature Study Guides - texts in context.Poems for study » Henry Purcell » Imagery and symbolism in Henry Purcell
The seabird
The poem finishes with a very dramatic image of a great sea-bird. Hopkins was fascinated with birds, as well as with the sea and the shore (The Wreck of the Deutschland, The Sea and the Skylark). Here, he sets the seabird against an equally dramatic shoreline:
‘The thunder purple seabeach’ repeated in ‘plumèd purple-of-thunder’.
The image in the final tercet has developed through the first:
- ‘angels’ introduces the idea of wings or ‘pinions’
- This moves on to ‘pelted plumage’, on which are ‘moonmarks’, a curious made-up word (usually called a neologism)
- ‘Quaint’ clearly does not mean ‘oddly old-fashioned’, as it does to-day, but skilled, ingenious. Probably Hopkins meant, then, ‘distinctive markings which look something like those of the moon’, a very particular image.
This image of the bird is one of the best examples of Hopkins’ use of the extended metaphor.
- There are some difficult images in the second quatrain.
- What do you make of ‘forgèd features’ (presumably not ‘fake’!) and ‘proud fire’?
- Do any of the images seem particularly musical?
The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell
and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given
utterance to the moods of man's mind, he has, beyond
that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as
created both in him and in all men generally.
Have fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell,
An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal
Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy,
here.
Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,
Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle:
It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs
the ear.
Let him Oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me!
only I'll
Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to
his pelted plumage under
Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever he has walked
his while
The thunder-purple seabeach plumè purple-of-thunder,
If a wuthering of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a
colossal smile
Off him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with
wonder.
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