Poets' Corner: The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God

By English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), whose poetry is notable for unusual rhythms and alliteration.  The best approach is to read it aloud slowly, savoring each syllable, rhyme, and repetition.

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.

I chose this poem for today's post because it is quoted in this speech I happened upon, "Why Beauty Matters," by the American poet and essayist Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a brilliant man with deeply spiritual views.  

I'm afraid the speech is rather heavy going on a hot August afternoon - even your Head Trucker had to rewind and repeat some sentences several times - but it will repay careful attention.  

(For the record, I am not a Catholic, but as an Episcopalian I feel myself in a distributary stream of the broad current of Christian thought from apostolic times forward.)

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