Spring, nothing is so beautiful as spring

Gerard Manley Hopkins published 1877 401 characters medium

Nothing is so beautiful as spring— When 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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About this text

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote this sonnet in May 1877 in Wales, and its heavy alliteration and odd word order belong to the style he built for himself. It came during his last year of study before ordination. The poem stayed in manuscript until Robert Bridges brought out the collected Poems in 1918. Wikisource carries that edition.

Where this text comes fromHopkins wrote this in May 1877 in Wales, in the last year before he was ordained, and like everything else of his it waited for Bridges and the 1918 volume. The sonnet belongs to a short run of poems from that spring which are the least troubled things he produced; the darker sonnets came later. The copy linked below follows the 1918 text, including the word order, which reads as broken until you say it out loud and hear where the stresses were meant to fall.

What you might not noticeSeventy-one words pass before the first full stop arrives, and the 1918 editor chose to hold them together with semicolons rather than break the sentence into pieces Hopkins had not written. Source

What it trainsSeventy-one words and not one full stop until the very end. That single fact defines the exercise: you cannot use sentence boundaries to check yourself, and by the fourth line most people have stopped reading ahead and started guessing. Five commas and four semicolons are the only places to breathe. The alliteration works against you too, because long and lovely and lush sit next to each other and the fingers begin repeating a pattern instead of reading the next letter. Eight capitals in 401 characters is a light Shift load by the standards of this shelf.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource