Friday Poetry Blogging

Getting back on track here after a hiatus from poetry.

Today's selection is by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Unless my memory fails me as a former English major, I believe Hopkins was a Jesuit priest with a distaste for Latinate words. Um, yeah.

Thanks to this quirk, he wrote, IMHO, some of the most beautiful poetry in the English language. The following poem is one of my favorites of his, even though I'm not a religious person. The imagery and sound are just so wonderful.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.