heltering with Benjamin Mosse

I named this weblog heltering after a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that resonates closely with the power and rage of nature. At this time of year, the imagery of nature’s savagery in Hopkins’ poetry manifests itself in the world, so I thought I might take a moment to explain why I call the blog what I call it.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (from Wikipedia)

If you have not come across Hopkins’ poems before (and even if you have), I suggest that you read the poem out loud, slowly. Take particular care when pronouncing the words: Hopkins took great labour to let you know how to pronounce the poem, right down to the marks.

SRIKE, churl; hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail
May’s beauty massacre and wispèd wild clouds grow
Out on the giant air; tell Summer No,
Bid joy back, have at the harvest, keep Hope pale.

Heltering is a sort of reverse kenning. A kenning is a compounding of single ideas to create a more dramatic tension in the language. I say “sort of” because helter is a reduction of helter-skelter, disorderly speed and confused action.

There are some fine other Helter-Skelterers: the Beatle’s Helter-Skelter, an out of order track on the White Album, of which Paul McCartney said was added because he wanted to create loud, dirty noise. The song’s been covered by everyone from U2 to Oasis (I’m going to pass over the Manson cover and its morbid details).

Helter-skelter, like pell-mell, hurly-burly and harum-scarum, is an example of a rhyming reduplication, a word that only exists in pairs: breaking it down is to add meaning to a word without one. The additional layer of meaning comes from how the word sounds.

So there we have it: an appreciation for the unkempt power of nature, a reduction, a confusion of loud, dirty noise.