I started writing poetry the same year I read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings for the first time.  It all began with a class assignment.  My sixth grade teacher took the class outside during our study of poetry and told all of us to spread out, sit quietly, and let our surroundings inspire us.  I remember going to sit by the garden, taking out my notebook, and just sitting there staring at the colorful flowers;  I had never gone outside, sat down, remained still, and just listened for the sake of finding inspiration.  But, I remember the way it felt to close my eyes and feel the gentle breeze playing with my hair, to take deep breaths and look at everything in new ways.  It was as if I had been introduced to a whole new world; suddenly everything was so beautiful, so much deeper and meaningful than it had ever been before, and I could feel my heart stirring within me, as if for the first time.  I began scribbling on the paper, and when I was finished, I read what I had written and was delighted, because I was actually proud of my work- in my mind I had captured the moment perfectly.  I ran over to my teacher to show her, and though she was not as excited as I had hoped she would be, she still nodded with approval and said it was pretty good.  This was better than overwhelming praise would have been, because it made me want to keep trying, to continue writing to achieve something even more lovely with my words.  Ever since I wrote that poem, entitled “Silent Statue” (the inspiration being a little statue of St. Francis holding a bird, positioned in the middle of the garden), the world has been a different place for me.  I had experienced a paradigm shift, and now I was looking at the world through the eyes of a poet.  Everything became more dramatic, words became more valuable, and my surroundings became more, well, visible.  It was like switching from a black-and-white screen to a colored one, or more like from a fuzzy screen to a 3-D one, because the whole world began to jump out at me in vivid colors and shapes.

After that class, I continued to write poetry.  But, I never really developed a love for reading poetry.  In second grade, my teacher used to read to us from Mattie J.T. Stepanek’s adorable poetry books, which I enjoyed, but after that I never did any poetic reading on my own.  Honestly, I wrote poetry for almost three years before I started reading it voluntarily, and even then it was only Tolkien’s poetry or poems he had translated (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for example), with a few exceptions (William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” was an early favorite).  It was not until this year that I really discovered the joy of reading poetry, and how it can work like a mental energy drink for a poet needing inspiration.  Through my English class, I was introduced to Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven”, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and which began to stir that appreciation for poetry within me.  But then the course introduced me to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I began to fall in love with reading poetic verses.  The first Hopkins poem I read was “God’s Grandeur”, and I was struck by how much beauty Hopkins had packed into so few lines.  I read the poem again, and even read it out loud, simply enjoying the way the words sounded, and the incredibly stirring image the poem brought to mind, especially in the last two lines: “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings,”.1  And then, it was on to “The Starlight Night”, in which Hopkins eloquently describes the stars, which have always been an incredible source of inspiration and beauty to me, and “Spring”; these two poems, followed by “Pied Beauty” (“All things counter, original, spare, strange;”),  showcase Hopkins’ talent for describing the radiance of Earth’s raw exquisiteness, and it was as if I was back in sixth grade, staring at the flowers for the first time.2  Hopkins had, as an adult, captured the innocent wonder of a child staring at the great world around him, realizing how lucky he truly is to have eyes to see it.  Hopkins’s masterful skill for connecting the originality of God’s creation to His awesome grace and power took my childish delight to a whole new level, a level I had never experienced before him.  I continued to read his poetry in ecstasy, relishing every word, every dash, every newly-invented phrase.  This delight climaxed in “May Magnificat”, which compares Mary’s joy in pregnancy and motherhood to Mother Nature’s similar joy in Spring. 

While I was still reveling in a world of Hopkins, my family started reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit together.  And, as we read the detailed descriptions of Middle-Earth aloud, I found myself enjoying them more than I ever had previously.  Though I had never been one of those people who skipped the “boring parts” in Tolkien’s works, I had never given them the appreciation they deserved.  But now, I was listening with changed ears- ears that thrilled to hear about Bilbo’s “… deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river” and the Eagles’ “…moonlit spikes of rock sticking out of black shadows”.3  Beorn’s beautiful lodgings were turned into the Garden of Eden, and the devastated land around the Lonely Mountain seemed comparable to the way the world must have looked to Adam and Even when they were cursed to work the soil after the easy life in Paradise.  Instead of walking through Middle-Earth alone with Tolkien, I now had Hopkins holding my other hand, and together these two great men opened my eyes to see radiance in unlooked for and unexpected places. 

Tolkien and Hopkins would have been wonderful friends, because they both found God in Nature, and used their talent with words to bring this unique perspective to others (Tolkien’s description of Niggle’s tree in his short story “Leaf by Niggle” is the most perfect example of how his love of nature is very similar to Hopkins’s).  After reading both of these authors at the same time, I have found the experience to be nothing less than essential.  Tolkien showed me that life is deeper than it appears on the surface, and Hopkins made it possible for me to see this in the complex simplicity of a flower, or the burning of a far-away star, for “All that is gold does not glitter,” and- like the Christ Child in the manger- many of the world’s most lovely things can be found in the most humble of places.4

“Glory be to God for dappled things,”!5

 

1 The Treasury of English Poetry (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984): 639.

2 Ibid, 640.

3 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 2; 103.

4 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994), 241.

5 The Treasury of English Poetry, 640.