Prime Flashcards
Gareth Reeves
‘a simulacrum of time suspended, a timeless now, this holy moment, before the onset of History and being in time’
Horse Canonicae attempted to see the implications of the ______ in every day life
crucifixion
agape is the fulfilment of ______
eros
The sequence compares with______.
Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’
Prime exhibits the numinous in the otherwise mundane. Akin to _____ ______, this is the sacred awe which invests the everyday with spiritual significance.
Hopkins’ inscape
Spears
it ‘reflects upon the moment of waking and assuming human nature, of re-entering history. When identity, volition, and memory are assumed, paradise is lost, but the human task is begun again, the ‘lying self-made city’ is again our responsibility’
‘kind’
invokes the theme of blessedness
the dynamism of existence, since it comes from God, has a ‘poise of being’ (First Things First) like the mountain’s poise of stone’
which contains the paradox of a perfect synchronism as well as spontaneous action
‘quell’
indicates the difference between the action of body and mind; the body is free ‘fly open’ whereas the mind relies on deliberate acts of will and must ‘quell the nocturnal rummage’ of the subconscious
the subconscious is
‘ill-favoured, / Ill-natured and second-rate / Disenfranchised, widowed and orphaned / By an historical mistake’
‘widows and orphaned’
suggests the apparent chaos depicted in Hopkins’ “The Wreck of Deutschland,” which obscures God’s plan for the soul of man (in Hopkins’ poem the sea ‘spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps)
concurrent with the achievement of a name and a history, is the necessary responsibility for life, as Auden had expressed in
‘Their Lonely Betters’: ‘assumed responsibility for time’
‘holy’
the moment of waking is ‘holy’ because it carries the continual possibility of the Redemption. Pun on ‘wholly’ and ‘holy’ as the moment is whole in that there is no disparity between it and life (‘light’s laconic outcry’
rhyming ‘act’ and ‘intact’
draws opposition between wholeness at beginning of day (‘holy’) and the necessary evil which accompanies any human action.
where is there a sudden change of emphasis?
commencement of stanza 3 as drawing breath is seen as an act of will, a conscious act which is ‘different’
