Page:Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918.djvu/131

108 Text is from corrections in B. The second version in A has lightning for shining in line 2, explained in a letter of Jan. 4, '83. B returns to original word.

11. '. Standard rhythm, in parts sprung and in others counterpointed, Rhyl, May '77.' A. This version deleted in B, and the revision given in text written in with new title.—G. M. H. was not pleased with this sonnet, and wrote the following explanation of it in a letter '82: &apos;Rash fresh more (it is dreadful to explain these things in cold blood) means a headlong and exciting new snatch of singing, resumption by the lark of his song, which by turns he gives over and takes up again all day long, and this goes on, the sonnet says, through all time, without ever losing its first freshness, being a thing both new and old. Repair means the same thing, renewal, resumption. The skein and coil are the lark's song, which from his height gives the impression of something falling to the earth and not vertically quite but tricklingly or wavingly, something as a skein of silk ribbed by having been tightly wound on a narrow card or a notched holder or as twine or fishing-tackle unwinding from a reel or winch or as pearls strung on a horsehair: the laps or folds are the notes or short measures and bars of them. The same is called a score in the musical sense of score and this score is "writ upon a liquid sky trembling to welcome it", only not horizontally. The lark in wild glee races the reel round, paying or dealing out and down the turns of the skein or coil right to the earth floor, the ground, where it lies in a heap, as it were, or