It Works, but Not Immediately--and this is what so often keeps me from thoroughly enjoying poetry (and philosophy too, for that matter)

I am astonished this morning. I plan to respond more to James Sires book, How to Read Slowly, more later, but this morning I cannot hold back and wait to say this.

I read a poem this morning, a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins this morning, and got it, at least a little bit, understood it in some sense. I read it twice last night, and it was nothing to me but a jumble of words and sounds, but this morning, even though I had forgotten all about it in the night, this morning it suddenly and unexpectedly made sense to me. I knew how to read it this time, even though I didn't know how to read it before.

Can I reprint it here, or must I satisfy myself with providing a link?

Hurrahing in Harvest

I don't do a lot of poetic analysis if I can help it, so I cannot tell you what I got from the poem, and don't really wish to, but what astounds me is that I read these words last night and didn't understand the rhythm of them, and when I read them again this morning, all of a sudden I did.

I want to understand and appreciate poetry, I really do, but I do tend to be like the tourist that Sire describes in his book, moving too quickly to really see what I am looking at. We do this in life too, you know.

And what I realize just now is that part of the Hopkins poem is the gazing, not any kind of sleazy voyeurism, but the taking time to see what's there. The Carolyn Weber book, Surprised by Oxford, is about this in some sense too.

I am one who wants to see. There is enough of the mystic in me for that. But I don't always see. I don't always see.

Read the poem, if you wish to, and if you don't understand it, read it again. And then read it again. And then don't read it for a while, and then read it again. This is one of the ways that poetry works. How easily I forget that.