Poem of the month – Dec ’16.

With Christmas in the air, what better time to remember one of my favourite poems, Gerald Manley Hopkins’ “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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1866, detail from a photo by Thomas C. Bayfield. (National Portrait Gallery).

— Shomit

 

Posted in Blog on Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Tagged with Gerald Manley Hopkins, God, God's Grandeur, poetry

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