The Holidays with Hopkins' "The Windhover." Falcon video.

You'll enjoy today's poem more if you permit yourself the pleasure of this falcon on film.
Flying With The Birds on Devour.com

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

The period from now to the end of the year is a miasma of insanities in America. Families and friends make themselves crazy with revisiting old group dynamics, thinking--no, believing--things will be different this time around. This of course puts enormous pressure on everyone who's wandering through old rooms, "hoping it might be so," as Hardy says about Christmas in "The Oxen."

I don't want to add any grim poems or other downers to this mix, at least for a few days. So here again is Gerard Manley Hopkins and perhaps his most famous poem, "The Windhover." I love the fact that its being a poem of ecstasy does not in any way make it a simple-minded poem. No, this is intelligent adult joy, though fairly sexless. Or is that debatable? And what does Hopkins mean by "buckle"?

Let's digest all that with the turkey, let's gash gold-vermillion, as o'er the fields we go, burping all the way (I'll blame the bird, you can blame Hopkins).

In case today's BanjoBrain has been exhausting, here again are my recently discovered matinee idols for a pick-us-up:

YouTube - The Collins Kids - Dance & Sing

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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The Collins Kids again, Jacques' "Seven Ages of Man," "Fern Hill"

If you'd rather, feel free to skip to the bottom with Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, for I realize I've gotten carried away with the Collins Kids. It's just that I still cannot figure out how, growing up at the edge of Appalachia, I completely missed them, unless they were just too far west, on an Oklahoma farm, then in California show biz.

Here are some tidbits: Lorrie Collins was Ricky Nelson’s first steady girlfriend (http://www.rockabillyhall.com/CollinsKids1.html.). She also performed with Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. After Lorrie's retirement to motherhood in 1961, “the Collins Kids remained silent until they reunited to much acclaim in 1993. By that time Larry had become a successful producer and writer, penning country classics like ‘Delta Dawn’ and ‘You’re The Reason God Made Oklahoma.’” (www.ponderosastomp.com/).

YouTube - Tanya Tucker-Delta Dawn

YouTube - Collins Kids, Bimbo's, San Francisco, December 1993

YouTube - Collin Kids - Documentary about Lorrie and Larry

So maybe there are some happy endings in the lives of country music artists.

All this leads to the too familiar theme of the stages of life, so here is Jacques (remember to Anglify it to "Jay-Queez," though I never learned why) in Shakespeare's As You Like It, with his Seven Ages of Man speech.

YouTube - "7 Ages of Man" from "As You Like It" (Nicholas Pennell)

And here again is Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill." (Today I'm finding Wordsworth just embarrassingly gassy. The Welshman is concise by comparison.).

Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Tell me where else you're going to find Rockabilly child stars, Shakespeare, and Dylan Thomas under one umbrella, and everybody getting along just fine.

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The Collins Kids and Wordsworth, or Why I Don't Get Rap

Photo: The Young, All Ears.
(near South Haven, Michigan)

Maybe they were on WWVA in Wheeling, WV and Grand Ol' Opry on WSM in Nashville, but somehow I missed the Collins Kids in the 1950s. Thanks to Sandy-- http://www.blogger.com/profile/03307968128182359860--who recently posted about Ricky Nelson's singing sons, I clicked around in a fit of nostalgia and ended up with an introduction to the Collins Kids, a brother and sister act, plus a reacquaintance with the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Brenda Lee, Jack Scott and some others. If you're in the mood for, or actually need, the soft chaos of wandering backward, then click away, not only at my offerings, but also down the right side of "the page" at YouTube. Wow.

YouTube - The Collins Kids-Chantilly Lace

YouTube - collins kids

YouTube - Collin Kids - Documentary about Lorrie and Larry

YouTube - Rick Nelson Garden Party 1985

And in case you're about to complain that there's no poetry today, here are two passages from Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode." Yes, it was fuel for the movie Splendor in the Grass with Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;— ...

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

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