and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace--
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs, deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God.
On the surface, such a swirl of language might resemble logorrhea, yet Hopkins is always striving to be precise, to arrive at what he called the haecceitas, or thisness, the fundamental individuality of an idea or thing. Even now the poetry that resulted seems astonishingly modern. Imagine how rebarbative, how transgressive it must have sounded in the age of Tennyson.
from The Washington Post: Michael Dirda on 'Gerard Manley Hopkins'
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