GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

[1844–1889]

God’s Grandeur

Born in London, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was the eldest of eight children. His father was a ship insurer who also wrote a book of poetry. Hopkins studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and, after converting to Catholicism, taught in a school in Birmingham. In 1868 he became a Jesuit and burned all of his early poetry, considering it “secular” and worthless. He worked as a priest and teacher in working-class London, Glasgow, and Merseyside, and later as a professor of classics at University College, Dublin. Hopkins went on to write many poems on spiritual themes but published little during his lifetime. His poems, which convey a spiritual sensuality, celebrating the wonder of nature both in their language and in their rhythms, which Hopkins called “sprung rhythm,” were not widely known until they were published by his friend Robert Bridges in 1918.

The world is charged wíth the grándeur 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?

Génerátions 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.

Ánd, for all this, náture 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 óver the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.