I can't tell you what a pleasure it
is to have a child who falls asleep in my arms at night,
saying, moon poem, mommy, moon poem.
And I'll finish up with another of my favorites.
This is Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover."
Many of the poems that I read as a youngster
were by English poets, British poets,
and they reflected that world.
And Hopkins, too, is British--
was British.
But this is one whose rhythms and whose imagery
really struck me as capturing this kind of stark and strong
beauty of the Sonoran desert.
So I responded to it so instinctively
and deeply, and only later did I realize
that it does have a lot of the kinds of complex stresses
and rhythms and interior rhymes of the great old Norse poetry
that I would one day go to college to study.
My father actually says I'm the only person
he knows who has five degrees in fairy tales.
And this is not one of those ancient poems, but it has the--
it has the strength of some of them, of the best of them.
"I caught this morning morning's minion,
kingdom 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 a 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 valor 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 plod makes plow down sillion shine,
and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, fall, gall themselves,
and gash gold vermillion."
Thank you.