parallel they may seem to be, meet in infinity.
Finally, faced with this supreme paradox at the heart of all being, in the very being and name of God as YHWH, or “I am”, the poet declares, as if limiting himself to the L of “Laus”, “Praise him!”
“Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise”
“The stooks rise.” Here the first question that obviously arises is, “What are stooks?” Shameful it is that such a question should arise, but now a whole generation has grown up without ever having set eyes on a stook field. The last time I myself set eyes on such a field in England was in 1975. We were travelling along a motor-way by coach, and I wanted the driver to stop and let me take a photo of the field. I knew that such fields were already on the way out, and I wouldn’t have many chances left to take a photo of one. But alas! On such a motor-way such a large coach wasn’t allowed to stop. So there was no way of persuading the driver to stop, and no way of taking that photo. And I haven’t had such a chance again. “O tempora, O mores!” – as Cicero once had occasion to complain.
“The stooks rise.” Then what are stooks? And why was it so necessary for me to take a photo of them? I have myself made stooks in a stook field. It was during the war, when schoolboys went from the towns to work on farms. It was such a good experience for me! There I was so much closer to reality than back at school with my books. It was after the fields had been harvested. As the poet says, “Summer ends now.” And as he continues, “Now barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise.”
“Summer ends now.” The harvesters had preceded us, cutting the ripe corn, wheat or barley, with their sickles. Seizing armfuls of the corn and cutting what they held, they would bind them into sheaves and leave the sheaves on the ground. Then it was for us to pick up the sheaves and stack them together, five or six at a time, enabling them to dry. When they had properly dried, they would be carried off the field in carts or lorries to the threshing floor. There they would be subjected to the process of threshing, or beating, so that the dried grain would fall to the ground in piles of edible gold for storing in barns. It was a process as old as the hills, going back to the distant past from ages out of number and memory.
“Summer ends now.” But now, alas, those ages have passed, and all is new and modern. Sheaves and stooks and stookfields have all been forgotten, and harvesting machines have taken their place. Now they complete in an hour what it used to take many labourers to do in many days. Now they leave not “barbarous beauty” in stooks but only mechanized ugliness in cubic bales of straw from which the grain has already been mechanically extracted. “O tempora, O mores!”
“Summer ends now.” “Now, now” – how Hopkins delights to repeat the word, springing lightly from the summer season, “Summer ends now”, to the sight of the stooks rising around him on either side of the road, “Now barbarous in beauty the stooks rise.” The end of summer is the beginning of autumn, and autumn is the season of harvest, or Herbst in German. The barbarous beauty of the stooks is strangely reminiscent of the “brute beauty” of the “Windhover”.
“Now barbarous in beauty.” The epithet “brute” belongs to the bird, with “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing”. The other epithet “barbarous” belongs to the stooks with their beards (barba in Latin) showing from the ears of barley. (Barley, you should know, has long beards, and wheat only short ones.) All this beauty is, moreover, here and now, in what T.S. Eliot calls a “point of intersection of the timeless with time”. It appears between two seasons of the year, summer and autumn, as it were cut in two by the farmer’s sickle.
“Now barbarous in beauty.” No wonder the poet, as he walks along the road, is filled with indescribable feelings of enthusiasm. As he passes the stooks on either side, he sees them in their form, piled together like the roofs of houses, pointing upwards to the skies. The word he uses for them, “rise”, conveniently rhymes with “skies”. There he sees them up above – not alone in plain blue splendor, but mottled, dappled with the white of “silk-sack clouds”. “Has wilder, willful wavier,” he asks, “Meal-drift moulded ever or melted across skies?” How conveniently the word “skies” chimes with “rise”!
“Summer ends now.” Now as he looks up at the skies with their moving clouds, drifting slowly in one direction before an unseen wind blowing above, his very language, his very choice of words, directs him from “wavier” to “Saviour”. It is as if the wilful waving of the drifting clouds leads him from what he sees with his eyes and feels in his heart to what he recognizes in the heavens as the greeting of Jesus himself, Our Saviour. “I walk,” he says. “I lift up, I lift up,” he repeats, “heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour”. Here we may note the repetition of “lift up”, denoting the upward movement of his eyes and his heart while walking along that road, apparently not minding if anything or anyone may be coming from the opposite direction.
“Summer ends now.” Now he turns from what he sees with his eyes and feels in his heart to ask himself, with yet another repetition, “And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?” In his mood of exultation he is always repeating himself, saying “one thing and the same” all the time, over and over again. He is breathless with enthusiasm, walking not so much on the road below as in the heavens along the “wind-walks” up above.
“Summer ends now.” And now out of the heavens, as in the ancient Christian past to Stephen and Paul, there appears to the poet a revelation of glory. There appears the form of the Saviour himself, reaching down to him and embracing him with rapturous love. Now he is no longer speaking to Jesus in his heart, but he feels the echoing sound “of realer, of rounder replies”.
“Summer ends now.” Now the poet, in moving from the octet to the sestet of his poem, is once again looking ahead of him, if only for prudence’ sake. But now he still sees our Saviour not only in the heavens above him, but also in the hills ahead of him. For now he sees “the azurous hung hills” – the azure skies in between the hills on the horizon as though hanging down and holding up the earth on which he is walking – as “his world-wielding shoulder”.
“The azurous hung hills.” In fact, everything is for him upside down. For now he is looking on Christ our Lord as a latter-day Atlas upholding the earth and everything on it, including the poet himself. How majestic he looks, stalwart as a stallion, sweet as the violet hue on the distant hills in the hour of sunset!
“The azurous hung hills.” All these images of Christ now come crowding into his mind as he directs his gaze from the skies above to the hills before him. There lies his collegiate home. All these things have been here all the time, he reflects, as if awaiting his coming to be put together in relation to Christ. Then still breathless, still repetitive, he exclaims in wonder, “These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting.” They were expecting him to come and behold them. “Which two”, he adds, like Milton’s Adam looking up at the starlight night, “when they once meet.” Well, we ask, after a pause, whatever next? “The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.”
“The heart rears wings.” All this repetition, one may say, indicates the breathlessness rising from the mind and heart, then passing through the lungs and into the mouth of the poet. “These things, these things,” he blurts, “were here, and but the beholder”, himself, “wanting.” Then shortly and sharply he goes on, “Which two when they once meet”. And there he lays special stress on “which” and “when”, not to mention the w-sound in “once”. And then back to the heart he goes on with, “The heart rears wings”. He takes up the “wings” alliteratively
