Oooooh I do like me a nice bit of intertextuality.* When this poem plopped in my inbox I was very glad to meet it. I’d be very interested to see what you make of ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ by Leontia Flynn. For ease of reference, here’s the poem with which Flynn’s poem has such a close relationship.
I like these poems so much that I must try hard not to write a brief dissertation on them both (!) but instead look at the Flynn, which was my excitement started. I love how vivid Flynn’s voice is. I feel I can hear the poem being spoken: so deliciously wry in stanza one, with that familiar— as in, of the family—mixture of humour and frustration, warmth and anger. I also love her how she relates to Hopkins’ work: it’s not a dry or academic interest but a case of “reading to know she’s not alone”. She writes of him in the way we might speak to, or of, a friend. When a poem like this ‘speak[s] to my condition’, as Fox would have it, I feel a sense of connection to and relationship with the creator and alluded-to artist as well.
I guess that’s what I like about intertextuality in general. Yes there is the surface level ego-thrill of recognising an allusion. Then there is the deeper level delight and enjoyment of the sheer deftness and playfulness of the echoes and allusions themselves, the play between words and ideas and feelings which ring between the two (or however many) texts. But at the deepest level, a really satisfying intertextual relationship, as I find in these two poems, gives me an experience of connection, of being surrounded by like minds; bolstered by empathy. And that’s always precious.
And all that’s quite apart from the joys of ‘Gerald Manley Hopkins’ itself: its conjuring of family dynamics, prejudices, habits of mind; and its deeply-experienced knowledge of what it is to endure those ‘cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’. This sounds less like ‘glut[ting] thy sorrow on a morning rose‘ and more like sheer endurance and survival (though we’ll return to the role of “glutting” next time). And I love the vulnerability at the end of the second stanza: the collapse into littleness and fear and need, the craving for sheer animal affection and comfort which at times is the only thing which can reach us. ‘There there‘. Sometimes we all need those almost wordless, nonsense-y words—precious because of the love from which they spring.
* (When I was a primary teacher, I really liked a book called The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by the talented Jon Scieszka. Someone will read it to you here.)
