WAB
Contributor
Wow, exquisite! I had not read this before. She sounds like she was really in the zone during this one. It sounds almost like Gerard Manly Hopkins' Sprung Rhythm, but I don't know if she read him? Hopkins' work didn't get widely known until Robert Bridges published his complete work after Hopkins' death.
Also a lot of Swinburne in there.
I don't know if you noticed, but I put a Christina Rossetti poem in the poetry thread, dedicated to you. I think Christine was probably a finer poet than her brother, and she is head and shoulders above the Brontes.
Have you read any of the more modern female geniuses? Namely Marianne Moore? MM was wickedly expert, sublimely good. Also Sylvia Plath.
It is Hopkins - good spot!
What happened? Did you copy and paste from Poetry Soup, or one of those kind of sites. They are notorious for misattributing (is that even a word?) poems. I caught one that was a real doozy: someone had attributed a Robert Service poem to John Berryman! Ha! What's funny is that a very well known poet (PM me if you want to know who) not only linked to the poem, but started a thread at a poetry workshop (PM me for which one, if you're even remotely curious) about it.
I went in and suggested that the poem, in quaint but deft fourteeners, was nothing like John Berryman ever composed. This widely published American (damn, I'm letting this cat out of the bag) poet returned to the thread, acknowledged the mistake, and then the thread suddenly disappeared.
I got no credit for spotting the mistake. Dang it.
Anyhow - I kind of wondered why Christine was aping Hopkins. But I don't trust my noodle anymore to get too much into it.