POETS Day: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Near Perfection
Ein Turmfalkenmännchen im Rüttelflug über dem Scharberg.
Do you know where the breaker box is in your workplace?
I do.
The kitchen manager in the restaurant I work in does too and so yesterday, when the power went out and we lost an hour of prep, our first diagnostical instinct was to make sure all was well with our own property. It turned out that a few blocks went down because a nearby construction site is not as strict about crane operations as I’d like them to be and some twerp took down a transformer, but it planted an idea.
Switch a breaker to off. Nobody in an office setting knows where the box is. POETS Day unfolds. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. In the ensuing chaos of a seeming power outage, you can break through the cell phone flashlights as your co-workers call the power company and navigate the automated phone trees until they get a “No outage is detected in your area,” by saying loudly that you have no time for this expletive and need to find an internet connection as you grab your laptop bag and get the hell out of the mess you made. You don’t have perceivable time for this nonsense!
Now you can hit the bar early, claim the weekend at mid-afternoon that was waiting for you at that six PM horizon, and possibly pretend you saved the Jenkins account come Monday. Good on you. POETS Day escape unlocked.
Today’s poem is among my all-time favorites and I came upon it oddly.
In restaurant work, you recognize those on the staff that are particularly good at one thing or the other. I’m apparently good at throwing people out.
I have developed an affability in response to the recognized turn towards cruelty that is my natural instinct. Long ago I decided that mean was not the direction I wanted to go, and that impatience was the road to mean. I worked toward nice and I’m not bragging when I say that I nailed it. I like people. I like engaging with them. I think one of the advantages is that I’m married to an astonishment and the rest of the world pales. Not anybody’s fault. She’s just clever.
I started looking for what was good in people and making it a point to excuse minor foibles. But at heart, there is still the instinct no matter how deeply buried.
So, I’m good at throwing people out. In the dive bars I love, it’s easy. You point at somebody and say “Enough,” and that’s it. In the fine dining places, it gets funny because inevitably you’ll be asked “Do you know who I am?” That’s a cliché but it happens all the time, and it’s a front of house manager’s best friend because it’s always said loudly by the offending patron.
So in front of an audience, you get to tell the potentate you have no idea who they are and neither do those around him, but the people around him all have a mildly entertaining story about a guy at a restaurant causing a problem. Want to flesh that story out? Let him identify himself as Dr. Jones or Councilman Flanders. Not “mildly” anymore. The story with an identified protagonist/antagonist is going to make rounds. Point that out and they cow.
My most epic throw out was a lithium-deficient stalker who set his demented sights on one of our pastry chefs. That poor girl had been terrorized by this ass for months and he came in during prep demanding to talk to her. He was tossed out western-movie style, where you have four guys each with a limb – I had the right leg – as he was screaming about how he was going to get us all.
He showed up later that night with three pipe bombs. I’m not kidding. We had told the police that he might be a problem and they put a patrol car in the parking lot across the street so when our valet sent up the red flag, the cops swarmed his car and shut him the hell down. I got to tell forty or so diners that we had a credible bomb threat in the parking lot and if they would please follow me to the neighboring lot everything would be fine.
Everything was fine, but while the bomb squad was detonating this loony’s homemade I love you explosives as we calmly explained to our guests that they would be able to return to their cars as soon as the police gave us the go-ahead, our sous chef had enough. “Alright,” he shouted. “You’re all clocked out. I’m not paying overtime for this bullshit.”
I’ve had a long and interesting restaurant career. Bea Arthur grabbed my ass. I played the quiet game with Cyndi Lauper’s kid. I’ve wrested a gun from an idiot that wanted more crackers in a place that didn’t have crackers to begin with, but the pipe bomb might take the cake.
The thing about throwing people out is that there’s a weird middle ground. Disruptive is out. Offensive is out. But there’s a middle ground. If you’re a soft-spoken twit you get to stay until the staff stops laughing at you in the wait station because you become the entertainment, and that’s where this week’s poem comes in.
There was a guy that used to come into the bar with a friend that acted as an apologist, and the apologist was pretty good at mitigating the disastrous nonsense his friend, who I will refer to as the jackass from here on, spewed forth.
The jackass spoke softly and so we’d let him persist because he wasn’t bothering anybody. A betting pool developed and the smart money ignored him and played the apologist. The jackass was going to start crying and he was going to curse Darwin. Every time. He would hit a point when the beer hit his cortex and Darwin and the Catholics in some way overcame his tear ducts and would start to sob. The question was when, and it was a staff pool dollar in on how many drinks it would take until either he cursed the Pope, Darwin, or started crying. The apologist could calm him, so the canny player watched the apologist’s first order.
If the apologist started with a beer or glass of wine you needed to bet long, but if he started with Scotch you knew the apologist was out and the jackass was uninhibited so the strong money was on a tear-filled Bishop Usher rant and Darwin was going to get his before the first drink went down.
I suspect the greatest cruelty was that for all his vitriol I considered him harmless. That was me considering another human and taking a pass. He was never a threat either physically or intellectually. I never considered throwing him out. He just railed and we didn’t care against what. We laughed at him. In retrospect it’s one of the meanest stances I’ve ever taken and I seek penance.
Occasionally in his sobbing he would break down and start reciting poetry. This is the jackass I’m speaking of. He really would,
He’d be two beers and a handkerchief in and launch into verse.
“This morning’s morning I remember…” or something, and he got it wrong but I asked him what the poem was. He told me it was “The Windhover” by Gerard Manly Hopkins. I looked it up. I’d never heard it and it was brilliant.
The real beginning is “I caught this morning’s minion…” and it proceeds to be one of the greatest poems I’ve ever read.
I don’t know that I ever would have come across it were it not for that twerp.
Funny enough, the jackass who spent a great bit of time telling me how awful I was for being Catholic turned me on to the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, an Anglican who took a turn to conversion so well he became a Catholic priest. That wasn’t in the betting pool but if you could have called it, you’d have been a hero.
I looked into his stuff. I write this as a dilettante fan of poetry claiming no expertise, but in this case I scream that Gerard Manley Hopkins is brilliant. He’s up there with all my war poet crushes.
In high school we had an annual poetry reading contest. It was part dramatic reading and part text selection.
We were taught to slow it down and enunciate.
Don’t do that with Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Go fast.
He uses all these internal rhymes and rhythms and you need to race through to get the sense of it.
“Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle!”
That kind of thing. Don’t stop. He’s meant to go fast.
This is the greatest poem not written by Robert Graves (Opinion is mine, but put a stamp on it because I’m right.)
The Windhover
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
- To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
It’s perfect. Devastating.
