Gerard Manley Hopkins. Since I was 20 or so, one of my Spring Poets. I never get tired of his greenness. I am grateful he, too, felt the things I feel (rightly or wrongly, with or without perspective). And I am grateful that even in the middle of complaining (ugh, is everything always going to be shitty? Is it always going to be this difficult?!) he is noticing so particularly—noticing how ‘banks and brakes’ are ‘leavèd’ and ‘lacèd’ (the off-accent of his sprung meter also giving a sense of intricacy and pattern) with ‘fretty chervil’. I have recently seen chervil appearing in stores here—springtime food—and it is indeed ‘fretty’; both in the sense of ornate (as in fretwork) and in the sense of overly precious and overworked. ‘[B]irds build—but not I build’, he writes; the most downtreading thing for me at the moment. To be without work, without things I am expected to do, to be not building but straining. When he asks for rain at the end of the poem, Hopkins has just finished comparing himself to a plant—not to birds, who build (are active). He only ‘strains’, like a plant does, pushing itself slowly forth. The work goes on, unseen, inside. The roots need rain. The work of the plant is slow. It seems not to be happening at all. Then one day it puts shoots out, the leaves unfurl, it might make a flower. The slow work of flowering (of writing, too) needs rain on its roots. I love this poem because Hopkins puts his complaint about how hard it is into the substance of the thing that is hard. I love its rhythms (MINE, o thou LORD of LIFE, send MY roots RAIN). And I love it because of his dual attention to the world around him and to his internal ache for something ‘fair’. He can’t get away from observing what he loves (the ornate leaves of chervil lacing the riverbank). The attention to the world tempers that ache, so that by the end the poem is not saying it’s just not fair!; it’s saying, this is what I need, please help me. It goes from anger and frustration and maybe fear to humility and desire. I often think of it when I am having a hard time managing my own envy of and attention to others’ successes (or even just their ability to work or to appear to be working) and it always makes me feel less alone that Hopkins, so long ago, in his own situations, also felt these things, and gave me language, a perfectly formed piece of language called a poem, for them.