Two Poems by Hopkins

I bid farewell to one of my favorite months on this Pentecost day with two stunning favorites by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

If any writer can get me to feel the rush of Spirit wind, the burning flame of the divine, the miracle of a reversed story-of-Babel  - Babel (and everything it stands for - arrogance, division) now gone and replaced by tongues speaking wonders for all the world to hear - it's Hopkins.  Enjoy.  [Photo:  Verbena by Patty Myrick.]

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 share's 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.

'As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame'

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is - 

Christ - for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.