Last night we finished the last of Keillor’s collection of Good Poems. We’re moving on to the Mary Oliver poems that Beth bought me last summer for my birthday. But, before we move on, a poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins, featuring the sprung rhythm that he took from Welsh poetry, entitled “Spring”.
I love the sound of this poem. It has a zing to it. It puts a skip in your step. I’ll confess that the first time I read it, I couldn’t really make much sense out of it. It didn’t seem to scan. Normally that would provoke a negative reaction. You know how I feel about poetry about poetry that has a “nimbus of nonsense.” I decided to invoke the Jabberwocky exception and just enjoy the poem for the feeling it evokes as it rolls off the tongue and not worry about the sense of it.
As I reread the poem and paid more attention to its commas, I revised my opinion and decided that it does scan. Or mostly scans. Those last couple of lines are still a little obscure to me. Here it is:
Spring
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
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You could read a lot of poems and not come across a line as good as:
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
If someone were to ask me to summarize my religion, I’d be hard put to come up with a better reply than: “What is all this juice and all this joy?
Every now and then, you come across a poem that makes you feel lucky to have read it. For me, this is one of those poems.
miltotto.com 
I liked the poem and I liked it more because you wrote about having to decipher the scan. I give it three stars.
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Heh. John would approve of this comment.
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