Topic 192: The Glory of the Commonplace

Carol:

Glory Be to Poets               

“Nothing is so beautiful as spring—   
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;” ( from  Hopkins “Spring” 1880)

Summer monsoons have brought new life to my front yard; unfortunately, I don’t find “glory in the commonplace” when it comes to weeds. Mine are shooting long and lush, but I won’t add “lovely.” Such is the spiritual vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins that his poems burst with passion for the smallest details of his God’s creation.  In weeds, he sees God; I see the Devil.

George Manley Hopkins

I first encountered Gerard Manley Hopkins(1844-1889) in high school. The story of an Anglican convert to Catholicism who became a Jesuit priest intrigued me. He must have been a very complicated man of competing passions because, after he entered the novitiate in 1867, he vowed to give up his writing and burned of all his poems. He kept that vow until 1875 when he began to write again after a tragic shipwreck at the mouth of the Thames that killed most of its passengers, including a group  of Franciscan nuns. The result was his poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (source:  poetry.org)

   Whatever his inner spiritual and emotional battles, Hopkins created poems that play with language and rhythm. My favorite poem is “Pied Beauty,” which must be read out loud for its sound but also to experience how the mouth, tongue and teeth release the words: 


  “ Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
   For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; “ (1877)

The poet who saw loveliness in a weed now praises cows and trouts and “all things original, spare, strange.” How can I greet the day any other way than with joy and gratitude for the commonplace? Glory be to Hopkins

I enjoyed Hopkins’ poetry for the same reason I had fallen in love with the poetry of E.E. (Edward Estin ) Cummings. A generation apart, an ocean apart, a worldview wider apart than that ocean,  yet Cummings and Hopkins shared a radical sense of form, stretching words and phrasing in new ways that challenge the reader to see the commonplace in new ways.  The first Cummings poem I read was “in just”

“in Just-
spring       when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles       far       and wee” 

In this poem, he celebrates a world that is “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful,”
a world of youthful delight in the commonplace. This morning I found another  Cummings poem that takes me back to Gerard Manley Hopkins.  The Unitarian Cummings glories in the same world of the ordinary and divine in his poem “I thank you God for most this amazing”

“i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes”

I look back out my window and the world is waking up. In the distance a neighbor is throwing flakes of hay into the stall where his horses greet every morning with an exuberant kick of the hooves and gallop around the pasture. Glory be to Cummings. 

Celebrate the commonplace in your day. Read “Pied Beauty” out loud or listen to Cumming’s poem “I carry your heart with me” on YouTube. Glory be!

 

Megan:

The Glory of the Commonplace

This topic seems like it could be on a bumper sticker. Live for the Moment. Seek the Glory of the Commonplace. It has a certain Tolle-esque ring to it. That’s the second time I’ve used the suffix –esque this week, and it’s only Tuesday. I’m going to try to use it every day.

For some people, like my father, living in the moment is a desirable but often unachievable state. For others, like myself, it’s such a natural condition we need to remind ourselves to consider the future. Somehow staring at my toes and applying for jobs don’t seem to go well together. But yesterday I sat down to work on a job application and when I looked back up at the clock, four hours had passed. That hardly ever happens. I suppose losing track of time while writing a cover letter is a more productive example of living in the moment than staring at my toes.

By the way, the reason I am staring at my toes so much is because I got a pedicure over the weekend and my feet have never looked so cute. As my friend Noel put it, I got “taken for a ride” by the pedicurist. I could neither hear nor understand what he was saying to me, so I just nodded every time he raised his eyebrows and now I have flowers on my toes. For a lot of people, getting a pedicure might be a regular thing. Maybe they are used to having flowers on their toes. This is new for me.

Flowers! On my toes!

And I was so delighted with the result that I didn’t even resent the fact that my post-pedicure feet are so slippery on the carpet that I fell down the stairs. I ignored the rug burn that extended the entire length of my calf, more concerned that I might have chipped the polish. Priorities, people.

Anyway, right now I’m sitting in the living room writing this essay, and Bella is on the floor next to me chewing on a bone I gave her as a bribe to not be so annoying. 

What she is doing

 We’ve already had our walk, but it wasn’t long enough to put her to sleep. My father is off on a motorcycle trip, so I have to walk both the dogs. I tried walking them together, but on Sunday morning (shortly after I fell down the stairs), we were chased by a coyote and it’s a lot easier to cope with that kind of situation with only one dog. I threw rocks, but I could hear the rest of the pack approaching and for a moment there, I was pretty nervous.  So, now I walk the dogs one at a time. I go the same distance, but their walk is halved. 

What I wish she was doing

I didn’t expect I would enjoy these walks so much. In addition to the wildlife, I also get to watch the sun come up every morning.  I’ve watched the sunrise more in the past few months than I have in the past 20 years. Of all the places I’ve lived, I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as the Arizona sky. It’s easy to take for granted what you see everyday, but not this:

  

Image credit:

The sunrise image came from here.