As kingfishers catch fire

The second of Penguin’s Little Black Classics shows a collection of poems of Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Unfortunately, they were not my taste and failed for the most part to hold my attention.

One nice little detail I wanted to point out though. I’m sure it has happened to a lot of us for whom English is not the mother tongue. Sometimes when a word also exist in your own language (but with a different meaning) you’ll be unable to see it properly in English. One of Hopkins’ poems provided one of these cases. It is in fact ‘no worst, there is none’. Which at first seems a normal sentence, but I believe I also pointed it out in a review of a book with the same name, ‘worst’ is the Dutch word for sausage, which led to some confusion on my side. The author, however, is not the least to be blamed for this in any case, but still I don’t think I will purchase a larger collection of his poems.