It’s over a year since I wrote a “scrip.”
Seems like a good time to return, now we are all at home in the coronavirus pandemic.
There’s a lot to read at the moment, not to mention all those funny videos that make us laugh, and the online chats with family and friends that keep us connected. So I’ll keep it short.
In early spring, whenever I see the new green growth along a footpath or a lane, I think of these lines:
See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build…..
Today I walked down a lane with just such thick-leaved and lacy growth along its edges. I’ve known and loved this Gerard Manley Hopkins poem since my teenage years, but only recently thought to find out what chervil looks like. And I discovered (as I haven’t a photograph you’ll have to search it out too, which is more fun anyway) that Hopkins has chosen the perfect word in calling it “fretty chervil.” This phrase, these lines, return to me year after year.
As other lovers of Hopkins know, this poem, for all the ecstasy of that lush description, is one of his “terrible sonnets.” He can’t share in the creative joy of spring. Birds build, but he cannot “breed one work that wakes.”
The poem ends with a passionate plea:
“Mine, O thou Lord of line, send my roots rain.”
This longing for the creative gift, the ability to make some work that wakes, is one we can all recognise. In different and less reverent ways, I have offered that prayer so many times.
Things come round again, over and over. The spring comes back, and I’ve probably written about these lines of Hopkins before, in previous springs. But that’s the beauty of spring: familiar in its return, yet always piercingly fresh.
In my new book, so slowly progressing, a character living through a strange springtime does the same thing as I did: she wonders what chervil is, picks a leaf from the riot of green, and brings it home to identify. May the springing fretty chervil, the blossom on the trees, the budding leaves, help me, and you, to find new life in our work; to make a work that wakes.