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poem of the week: god's grandeur
Mar. 18th, 2006 10:39 pmI have been reading quite a lot of poetry lately--well, this week especially I've been pouring over my Americans' Favourite Poems and my battered thrift store T.S. Eliot paperback, looking for meaning and plotbunnies and other shiny things. Certain of you seem to be rather poem-hungry. I am always eager to share poetry, so here we go. Every Saturday (or Friday, or Sunday, if I can't make it on Saturday), I am going to put a poem up for you lot, because poetry is shiny and spiffing and ought to be appreciated. Um. Yes. Done now. Poetry!
( and all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil )
Read this one aloud. It simply begs for it. Pastor Peter read this aloud a long time ago during a presentation for a message on worship, and it moved me so deeply that I wrote the name of the poet down and vowed to look him up, which of course I never did. I rediscovered the poem in my favourite poetry book, Americans' Favourite Poems (well, it was my only poetry book for a while, until Mum's friend Amy sent me the dictionary-sized World Poetry, which is also spiffing but has not yet been read quite so many times, so I am not quite intimate with it yet). I'm astonished that Hopkins wrote this in the nineteenth century and yet it still flames with emotion, with beauty. It is one of the first things that has ever given me a sense of worship as something insanely beautiful and joyful and euphoric. Take note of the elegant alliteration: it reminds me of Anglo-Saxon poetry, like that of Beowulf, although not quite so rigidly structred.
God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.
( and all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil )
Read this one aloud. It simply begs for it. Pastor Peter read this aloud a long time ago during a presentation for a message on worship, and it moved me so deeply that I wrote the name of the poet down and vowed to look him up, which of course I never did. I rediscovered the poem in my favourite poetry book, Americans' Favourite Poems (well, it was my only poetry book for a while, until Mum's friend Amy sent me the dictionary-sized World Poetry, which is also spiffing but has not yet been read quite so many times, so I am not quite intimate with it yet). I'm astonished that Hopkins wrote this in the nineteenth century and yet it still flames with emotion, with beauty. It is one of the first things that has ever given me a sense of worship as something insanely beautiful and joyful and euphoric. Take note of the elegant alliteration: it reminds me of Anglo-Saxon poetry, like that of Beowulf, although not quite so rigidly structred.
God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.
