The dearest freshness deep down things
This is one of my favorite poems. I memorized it several years ago, but haven’t read it, or tried reciting it, in… months and months. Decided to give it a go after quoting it in yesterday’s post about getting older. Remembered most of it!
God’s Grandeur
By 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.
jabel That’s a favorite of mine also and I love that you left in your struggle to remember that line! Excellent.
annie's micro(b)log @jabel that is always the line I stumble over. Such a beautiful poem.
jabel @JohnBrady @annie There’s something particularly about “shook foil” and “bright wings” that grabs me every time.
annie's micro(b)log @JohnBrady So true. And that is (imo) not true of much of Hopkins’s poetry.
annie's micro(b)log @JohnBrady @jabel That image of bright wings at the end gets me every time.
Jim Rain @JohnBrady Foil, as a sword, is surely apt; but Hopkins apparently meant something closer to your first reading: “I mean foil in the sense of leaf or tinsel… Shaken goldfoil gives off broad glares like sheet lightning and also… owing to its zigzag dints and creasings… a sort of fork lightning too.”
Jim Rain @JohnBrady I thought I’d remembered the goldleaf reference, but couldn’t remember where. Searching brought up this site. Footnote 18 deals with that one. “… ooze of oil / Crushed” isn’t mentioned in the footnotes, unfortunately.
David Walbert Ah, beautiful. I should get back to memorizing poetry (and start with that one). I took it up for awhile when my daughter had to do it as part of her homeschool curriculum—she was vastly better at it of course, being eight or nine years old—but then dropped it. I think I still remember all of Wendell Berry’s “Mad Farmer Revolution.”
David Walbert @JohnBrady I imagine crushing something like a seed, the oil welling up and oozing out. But the enjambment makes “crushed” a transition to “why do men not reck his rod?” and what follows. I’m probably wrong. Either way it is a strange image for grandeur.
annie's micro(b)log @dwalbert that’s part of what I love about the poem and Hopkins generally. The grandeur of God is like the ooze of oil crushed? And yet, yes. Hopkins showing us God not as tyrannical father demanding praise but God as humble, sacrificial, with love encompassing such tenderness that even the most divine grandeur is best shown as something lowly, trod upon, and willing to let it be so.