Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Gerard Manley Hopkins is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the Victorian era. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I. Hopkins’s family encouraged his artistic talents when he was a youth in Essex, England. However, Hopkins became estranged from his Protestant family when he converted to Roman Catholicism. Upon deciding to become a priest, he burned all of his poems and did not write again for many years. His work was not published until 30 years after his death when his friend Robert Bridges edited the volume Poems.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.1	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, December 19th, 2020.
0:10.1	Today's poem is by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it's called The Lead and Echo and the Golden Echo.
0:21.0	Full disclosure, this is one of my favorite poems, period.
0:27.7	But as we come up rather rapidly, some of you may still be a little nervous or anxious about
0:36.0	how rapidly we are approaching the Christmas
0:39.8	holiday.
0:41.1	This season of gift getting and gift giving and gift receiving, the lead and the golden echo
0:50.4	is a great meditation on the kinds of things we can or ought to give away and the kinds
0:59.1	of things we can't keep even if we try.
1:02.9	Here is the Latin Echo and the Golden Echo, a piece of what was meant to be a longer poetic work by Hopkins. He abandoned that work, but
1:14.3	fortunately for all of us kept this portion, which was meant to be the maiden's song from
1:22.3	his longer planned work, St. Winifred's Well. It's in two parts.
1:29.7	The leaden echo.
1:32.2	How to keep?
1:33.8	Is there any, any, is there none such, nowhere known some,
1:38.6	bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch, or catch, or key to keep back beauty, keep it.
1:46.6	Beauty, beauty, beauty from vanishing away.
1:51.0	Oh, is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rancid wrinkles deep down, no waving off of these most mournful
1:57.8	messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of gray? No, there's none.
2:04.5	There's none. No, no, there's none. Nor can you long be what you now are called fair.
2:11.9	Do what you may do, what, do what you may, and wisdom is early to despair.
	...

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