Topical Guide 985
Mark Dorset
Allusion, Quotation
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 35:
I leaned closer to one of the pictures. In it, Albertine was smiling, glowing. She was playing, and a group around the piano was singing. I couldn’t recall the occasion for all this juice and joy.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring”:
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 lightning 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.
I happen to know that “all this juice and joy” in the passage from Leaving Small’s Hotel is not only, or even primarily, a quotation from Hopkins’s poem, but also, and possibly primarily, a tip of the hat to Kraft’s father-in-law, William “Bill” Canning, who would greet displays of ebullience, especially at family gatherings, with “What is all this juice and all this joy?”
See also:
Allusion, Quotation TG 140, TG 455, TG 462, TG 502, TG 506, TG 532, TG 559, TG 583, TG 592, TG 626, TG 654, TG 657, TG 714, TG 735, TG 736, TG 738, TG 780, TG 781, TG 802, TG 829, TG 832, TG 935, TG 951, TG 957, TG 964, TG 979, TG 982
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