SLEEPING ON THE WING Assignment No. 3: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Read the poetry available at the hyperlinks below. Then, after reading the directions that follow, write your own poem.

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http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pied_Beauty

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Heaven%E2%80%94Haven

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/God%E2%80%99s_Grandeur

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Felix_Randal

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Spring_and_Fall

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Leaden_Echo_and_the_Golden_Echo

“Write a poem in which you say how much you like a whole lot of different things of a particular kind. You could praise round things, whatever’s blue or orange or purple, sparkling things, flat things, things that are triangular or heavy or new. Begin with one thing--say, an icy window if you’re writing about cold things or square things or white ones--and then just go on naming others as you think of them. When you mention each thing, think of some particular time you’ve seen it, and try to get the way it looked at that time into what you say. One way to do this is to make up a word combination--a combination of words that is so particular, that gets the color and shape and movement of things so exactly, that it could perhaps be used only once, only to describe what you see at that one second in your life--‘skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.’ You can try alliteration, too, if you like, and rhymes that are inside of lines.”

--from the Gerard Manley Hopkins chapter of Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell’s Sleeping on the Wing (Vintage, 1981).