Spring Poetry Competition

Announcing a Spring Poetry Competition.

[To make responding to this announcement easier I have moved it to this separate entry- please respond to this entry with your poems – following the instructions below].

Please post your entries (fully illustrated) into your Student Blogs and post a link to your entry as a comment at the bottom of this post.  So that means you must write your poem and post it into your blog and then come back to this Announcement and post a reply that says: Find my entry on “Spring” at http://studentblogs.acu.edu.au/fredblogs (or whatever your studentblog url is. The winning entry will be published on this page (with the winner’s permission). The prize is a Special Edition DVD of Robin Williams Dead Poet’s Society and a selection of new books relevant to the study of literature. Please post your entries by October 1st. The topic this spring is to write a poem beginning with the first line of G.M.Hopkins’s sonnet “Spring”. Here is the whole sonnet:

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
When weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

You are not required to write a sonnet, but you are required to use Hopkins’s first line as your first line. Have fun!