'Twould ring the bells of heaven,
 The wildest peal for years,
 If Parson lost his senses
 And people came to theirs.
 And he and they together
 Knelt down with angry prayers
 For tamed and shabby tigers,
 And dancing dogs and bears,
 And wretched, blind pit ponies,
 And little hunted hares.

This is a poem that lives vividly in mind, memory and heart. The skill is great but concealed. Imagery of the opening lines carries us deep into the poem before what we know what it is about. If the reader gets as far as ‘angry prayers,’ there is no way out and the reader must go on to the end. The last four lines are carefully built with a choice of the feral and the domestic victims of man’s inhumanity. The sound is brittle and matches the idea of these victim’s vulnerability. The controlled wrath of the poet is awesome. His lines crackle.

— Bob Williams

Links

Biography
http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/mirabile/mirabile2/hodgson.html

We’ve run one of Hodgson’s poems before: The Gipsy Girl [Poem #517], which displays the same finely-controlled wrath.