That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire

Terry Watkinson, 'The Headland'

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark

                            Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.

                            Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:

                            In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

                            Is immortal diamond.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Phillis Levin 

It was a good day for cloud-watching. Drama in skyland. It made me think of this poem. The clouds “they throng, they glitter in marches”  - that’s exactly it, and they most definitely “flaunt forth”. The poet seems here to have ripped into his storehouse of words for sounds and colours and movement and thrown everything at us. "Nature's bonfire", oh yes, he gives us a conflagration of words to embody his theme. It's a strain to read slowly when the movement is so driving. Nature truly is changing all the time, flaring up, flickering, dying out. The clouds demonstrate this daily. And we too, “how fast our firedint”, how quickly we burn and fade. Hopkins seems almost overcome by the thought until he forces himself to remember that this is not the end. Death will not extinguish him, will not” beat him level” while he holds to the hope of the resurrection, the hope that because Christ became mortal and died in his place, he has in turn taken on the immortality of Christ and will live forever. "Away grief's-grasping, joyless days, dejection"... Matchwood becomes diamond.