Neither body nor soul were made for the way things are.
In PA for a few days for the holiday. Read the following in Gerard Manley Hopkin’s diaries from the 1872:
April 8. The ash tree growing in the corner of the garden was felled. It was lopped first; I heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not see the inscapes of the world destroyed anymore.
One way of looking at poets and poetry is as a history of consciousness, as registers of historical transformation—phenomenological seismographs. In this light, Hopkin’s diary entry, to me, is striking. 1870 was around the time when the industrial, electrified, speedy version of the west really began—when pollution of the environment and demolition of medieval structures became features rather than bugs of civilization. People though, weren’t accustomed to this; they hadn’t normalized or accepted it, so there was a strong sense of inner-protest, resistance, despair. Watching a tree cut down destroys Hopkins; he wants to “die”; the tree’s death is his own spiritual death. Hopkin’s unusual word—