Consider a flower. Is there anything in nature so delicate, so exquisitely fine, so beautiful? They shine like jewels amidst a bank of swaying grass. Flowers burst from the soil, breathing out fragrance and color with reckless abundance, an inexhaustible expression of the deep wells of life that lie hidden, brewing in the earth.
Echos of Beauty
One poet who addressed the problem of transience was the Catholic priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. His reflection on the difficulty appears in a poem called “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” written in 1882.
This poem, sometimes referred to as “the maiden’s song,” is an excerpt from a longer, unfinished poem about the martyrdom of St. Winifred. In it, two maidens—the Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo—converse (or perhaps one maiden talks to herself) about beauty.
With the first voice, the Leaden Echo, the poet asks, “How to keep ... back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty/ from vanishing/ away?” Throughout the poem, Hopkins makes extensive use of repetition, alliteration, assonance, and rhyme—all of this reinforces the idea of an “echo” ringing through the lines, as the title implies. In the first half of the poem, this echo is one of despair.
The Leaden Echo continues with a lament over the signs of aging: “O is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankèd wrinkles deep/ Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still/ messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?” As we see in these lines, Hopkins had a great love for the sound of words, jam-packing them together in a sometimes bewildering barrage.
This barrage of sounds reflects the richness he saw in the reality around him, though in these particular lines the speaker laments the passing away of that richness. The fading of bodily beauty causes the Leaden Echo to despair: “no, nothing can be done/ To keep at bay/ Age and age’s evils, hoar hair/ ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding ... despair, despair, despair, despair.”
The poem’s first voice frames the problem acutely and finds no consolation because she sees no way to prevent the passage of time and all that time wrecks.
There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!); Only not within seeing of the sun, Not within the singing of the strong sun [...] Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with [...] dangerously sweet Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by- morning-matched face, The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty.
The Golden Echo acknowledges the grim appearance of things, that “whatever’s prized” seems to pass away, “swiftly away,” making it “dangerously sweet.” We have to acknowledge the reality of loss, brokenness, time. But that is not the end of the story. Hopkins, in the voice of the Golden Echo, repeats the Leaden Echo but in an entirely new and hopeful key. She expresses in a bombardment of beautiful and surprising sounds all of this world’s rich beauty that we gather to our bosom, epitomized in the beauty of the human body:
“Come then, your ways and airs and looks/ locks, maiden gear/ gallantry and gaiety and grace/ sweet looks/ loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant.”
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
An Example of Christian Hope
Only in the embrace of the author of beauty can beauty be truly preserved, the poet suggests. In a biblical allusion, he goes on to say “not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least/ lash lost; every hair/ Is, hair of the head, numbered.” The broken syntax of these lines make them almost stutter with the intense emotion and exaltation behind them. The Echo has a solution! In her excitement, it’s hard to get the words out. She believes that in some mysterious manner, nothing beautiful is ever truly lost, so long as it is rendered back the Eternal. Not even the least of our hairs.In truth, they never belonged to us anyway. Part of the Golden Echo’s response is this attitude of gratitude as an antidote to despair.
In this view, beauty partakes of something eternal, even if we cannot always see how. Loved by God, the beautiful is clothed and preserved in that that eternal love. So, the poet asks, what reason do we have for sadness? “O/ why are we so/ haggard at the heard, so care coiled. ... When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with/ fonder a care/ fonder a care kept than we could have kept it.”
Where exactly are all these beautiful things kept safe from time? The poem evades a direct answer to that question, concluding only with the echoing refrain, “Yonder.” This refrain draws us outward, away from ourselves and self-pity toward something higher, something beyond, to which all beauty directs us.
