Gerard M. Hopkins on bluebells Xxx

May 18th 1870
I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at . I know the beauty of our Lord by it. It[s inscape] is [mixed of] strength and grace, like an ash [tree]. The head is strongly drawn over [backwards] and arched down like a cutwater [drawing itslef back from the line of a keel]……………….…

In his journal entry for 9 May 1871 Hopkins says:
In the little wood opposite the light they stood in blackish spreads or sheddings like spots on a snake. The heads are then like thongs and solemn in grain and grape-colour. But in the clough through the light they come in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue, thickening at the double, vertical themselves and the young grass and brake-fern combed vertical, but the brake struck the upright of all this with winged transomes. It was a lovely sight. - The bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape, made to every sense. If you draw your fingers through them they are lodged and struggle with a shock of wet heads; the long stalks rub and click and flatten to a fan on one another like your fingers themselves would when you passed the palms hard across one another, making a brittle rub and jostle like the noise of a hurdle strained by leaning against; then there is the faint honey smell and in the mouth the sweet gum when you bite them. ………The overhung necks – for growing they are little more than a staff with a simple crook but in water, where the stiffen, they take stronger turns , in the head like the waves riding through a whip that is being smacked – what with these overhung necks and what with the crisped ruffled bells dropping mostly on one side and the gloss that they have at their footstalks the have an air of the knights at chess…………………………….


YES.

stunning detail. Although... did he say 'when you bite them'? I have to admit that for all my adoration of bluebells, I have never thought to do that.

I remember, last summer, in Cornwall, I wanted to be consumed by nature - it was far too glorious and I was far too miserable for any other course of action to really appeal. I had hay fever so I was functioning in a different - lacking blood, vision, well being and general sense - reality. The weather was beautiful, and we were staying in a tiny white washed hostel right near the cliff edge, all dark stone and crashing waves and heath stretching behind us to an old disused church. There was a moment when I was walking to the cliff edge because it seemed sensible to throw myself off it, because there were seals below, and the sea was the exact shade of my emotions, when Dr Kennedy, bless him, saved my life by popping out of the ether in all his beautiful professorish dashing glory and discussing some book or other with me.

I think he knew, although all the teachers were incredibly kind to me, I think not only because I could hold a decent conversation about something which we both could find interesting, nor simply because I happened to be getting pretty lucky with the cards on that trip, but because they could tell that I vaguely disliked being stuck with the bunch of fools which comprised my perception of the other students. So instead of leaping off a cliff I wrote a gothic short story about a pair of lovers falling off a cliff, or some such, and won the gothic story prize, which was dark chocolate, and thus, like all actions, it linked, in the end, back to food.



(ps. this is not really a story about an averted suicide. Well, it is in some ways, although I wasn't looking for death, and I refuse to say that this is really how one would write such a thing out.)