God's Grandeur

Today is one of those days that recalls the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, God's Grandeur. I had a nun in college who thought Hopkins was second only to William Shakespeare. You say you don't know Gerard Manley Hopkins? If you went to high school in New York state you did study him in English class, it was required in the days when the entire state followed the regents' curriculum. So I knew of him prior to education by the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart but it was in college that he was presented as the greatest poet of the Victorian Age.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (July 28, 1844 – June 8, 1889), a Jesuit priest, was an English poet whose posthumous, 20th-century fame established him among the finest Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially in regard to sprung rhythm) and his vibrant use of imagery established him as both an original and daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse. In 1864, Hopkins' reason for conversion to Catholicism was because of the reading of the deeply moving John Henry Newman's Apologia pro vita sua.

I wasn't particularly fond of Hopkins myself but every once in awhile a day arrives that reminds me of his best known poem, and today is one of those days.

So, here it is. I'm sure Sister Mary (can't remember rest of name), GNSH, is smiling down on me. She and Gerard are probably enjoying a spot of tea on such a grand day.

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.


Hopefully the sun will come out and I can add more photos.