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Thirteen ways to look at birds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLQ-GrGQZQ4&list=OLAK5uy_n3EEpSOPF2zhNzS...
This is a link to Paul Kelly's collection of poems by various poets that have been set to music. If you leave this link running it will play all thirteen songs but they are also displayed as separate links to individual songs. There are some well known names (Hardy, Keats, Yates, Dickenson) here but also not well known (to me at least) but the central theme is what the title says so no more explanation needed.
I love this CD because he (and others) capture the feelings that are portrayed within the poems yet also manages to create a contiguous whole - just let it run and feel the music take the words along. As there are thirteen poems here I cannot reproduce them all but there is one that I want to draw your attention and that is "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. To me, this is the essence of poetry - not because the poem has rhyme and rhythm and uses words in such original ways but because it paints that picture in words that a picture cannot do - or even a film of the event so described. He seems to get into the mind of the bird as it hovers and swoops - I know we can never know what is in the mind of a bird but with the aid of the music there is a completeness that makes this poem to me one of the greatest. This poem is dedicated to "Christ Our Lord". I am not a religious person (far from it) but I know what he means!

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

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