I've said it before and I'll say it again, Orwell is the bizzomb. To see the poem he's is writing about, ‘Felix Randal’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (who, by the way, is also dope), click here.

from “The Meaning of a Poem” by George Orwell

“...in any criticism of poetry, of course, it seems natural to judge primarily by the ear. For in verse the words – the sounds of words, their associations, and the harmonies of sound and association that two or three words together can set up – obviously matter more than they do in prose. Otherwise there would be no reason for writing in metrical form. And with Hopkins, in particular, the strangeness of his language and the astonishing beauty of some of the sound-effects he manages to bring off seem to overshadow everything else....

One cannot regard a poem as simply a pattern of words on paper, like a sort of mosaic. This poem is moving because of its sound, its musical qualities, but it is also moving because of an emotional content which could not be there if Hopkins’ philosophy and beliefs were different from what they were. It is the poem, first of all, of a Catholic, and secondly of a man living at a particular moment of time, the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the old English agricultural way of life – the old Saxon village community – was finally passing away. The whole feeling of the poem is Christian. It is about death, and the attitude towards death varies in the great religions of the world. The Christian attitude towards death is not that it is something to be welcomed, or that it is something to be met with stoical indifference, or that it is something to be avoided as long as possible; but that it is something profoundly tragic which has to be gone through with. A Christian, I suppose, if he were offered the chance of everlasting life on this earth would refuse it, but he would still feel that death is profoundly sad. Now this feeling conditions Hopkins’ use of words. If it were not for his special relationship as priest it would not, probably, occur to him to address the dead blacksmith as ‘child’. And he could not, probably, have evolved that phrase I have quoted, ‘all the more boisterous years’, if he had not the special Christian vision of the necessity and the sadness of death. But, as I have said, the poem is also conditioned by the fact that Hopkins lived at the latter end of the nineteenth century. He had lived in rural communities when they were still distinctly similar to what they had been in Saxon times, but when they were just beginning to break up under the impact of the railway. Therefore he can see a type like Felix Randal, the small independent village craftsman, in perspective, as one can only see something when it is passing away....”