Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.

What I do is me, for that I came.

Pied Beauty— " Glory be to God for dappled things-- For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.

All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.

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.

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

ELECTED Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give Him glory, too. God is so great that all things give Him glory if you mean that they should.

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief- woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing — Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling- ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'. O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

The Best ideal is the true and other truth is none. All glory be ascribed to the holy Three in One.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child Márgarét, are you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves, líke the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sórrow's spríngs áre the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

The Windhover To Christ our Lord I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves -- goes itself; _myself_ it speaks and spells, Crying _What I do is me: for that I came_. I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -- Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.

The beauty of a woman is first a soulful beauty. And yes, as we live it out, own it, inhabit our beauty, we do become more lovely. More alluring. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “Self flashes off frame and face.” Our true self becomes reflected in our appearance. But it flows from the inside

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.

Friend who has fired the kingfishers and flamed the dragonflies – they catch your light however they move and beam it out of their eyes.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring- When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling. (From "Spring")

All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

Why wouldst thou rude on me they wring-world right foot rock?

The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree. (from notes on 'Heraclitean Fire')

She fed him scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now. Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man's life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

No one is ever so poor that he is not (without prejudice to all the rest of the world) owner of the skies and stars and everything wild that is to be found on the earth.

And when Peace here does house He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo, He comes to brood and sit.

What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. To produce is of little use unless what we produce is known, is widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known that it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good. We must try, then, to be known, aim at it, take means to it. And this without puffing in the process or pride in the success.

No, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee

Shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. Gerard Manley Hopkins Inversnaid

…echo the Gerard Manley Hopkins line: ‘likeness tempered with difference’. So, the attainment of knowledge has affinities with the perception of harmony – order transcending complexity to establish a new concept with its unique elegance.

I bear a basket lined with grass; I am so light, I am so fair, That men must wonder as I pass And at the basket that I bear, Where in a newly-drawn green litter Sweet flowers I carry, -- sweets for bitter. Lilies I shew you, lilies none, None in Caesar’s gardens blow, -- And a quince in hand, -- not one Is set, because their buds not spring; Spring not, ‘cause world is wintering....

...Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc únselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.

Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of this kind of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many of these compounds are kennings. The word 'to ken' is still used in many Scottish and Northern English dialects, meaning 'to know'. Such language is a way of knowing and of expressing meanings in striking and memorable ways; it has continuities with the kinds of poetic compounding found in nearly all later poetry but especially in the Modernist texts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-earth right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring- When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; (from "Spring")

And I have asked to be Where no storms come

Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce's forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce's case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I let it surround me, it is as if I'm sunk into the pond of what she is saying, as if I'm some kind of patient, cruising amphibian, drifting in black water, entirely submerged except for my eyes, which blink every so often. Each word comes floating up to me like a thick, healthy lily pad and brushes past my head.

I never went to college. I don’t believe in college for writers. I think too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual. And the intellect is a great danger to creativity because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth--- who you are, what you are, what you wanna be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for twenty-five years now which reads, “Don’t think.” You must never think at the typewriter--- you must feel, and your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data, you do a lot of thinking away from the typewriter, but at the typewriter you should be living. It should be a living experience. The worst thing you do when you think is lie — you can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did, and what you’re trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself — find out who you really are, and try not to lie, try to tell the truth all the time. And the only way to do this is by being very active and very emotional, and get it out of yourself — making things that you hate and things that you love, you write about these then, intensely. When it’s over, then you can think about it; then you can look, it works or it doesn’t work, something is missing here. And, if something is missing, then you go back and reemotionalize that part, so it’s all of a piece. But thinking is to be a corrective in our life. It’s not supposed to be a center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life, being is supposed to be the center, with correctives around, which hold us like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not a way of life. The way of living is the blood pumping through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know, and the intellect doesn’t help you very much there. You should get on with the business of living. Everything of mine is intuitive. All the poetry I’ve written, I couldn’t possibly tell you how I did it. I don’t know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of these sorts of thing. It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that I loved. I love Shakespeare, I don’t Intellectualize about him. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins, I don’t intellectualize about him. I love Dylan Thomas, I don’t know what the hell he’s writing about half the time, but he sounds good, he rings well. Let me give you an example on this sort of thing: I walked into my living room twenty years ago, when one of my daughters was about four years old, and a Dylan Thomas record was on the set. I thought that my wife had put the record on; come to find out my four-year-old had put on his record. I came into the room, she pointed to the record and said, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’ Now, that’s great. See, that’s not intellectualizing, it’s an emotional reaction. If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art.” 

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning: The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle, Or paring of paradisaical fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless, Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain; A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quite utterly. This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily, Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

Be adored among men, God, three-numberéd form; Wring thy rebel, dogged in den, Man's malice, with wrecking and storm. Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue, Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung: Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

And now?[...]The printed word? The book trade, that old carcass tossed here and there by its ravenous jackals? Greedy authors, greedy agents, brainless book chains with their Vivaldi-riddled espresso bars, publishers owned by metallurgy conglomerates[...]And meanwhile language, the human languages we all must use, no longer degraded by the barking murderous coinages of Goebbels and the numskull doublespeak of bureaucratic Communism, is becoming the mellifluous happy-talk of Microsoft and Honda, corporate conspiracies that would turn the world into one big pinball game for child-brained consumers. Is the gorgeous, fork-tongued, edgy English of Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, of Charles Dickens and Saul Bellow becoming the binary code for a gray-suited empire directed by men walking along the streets of Manhattan and Hong Kong jabbering into cell phones?

Part of my interest was scientific, zoological. I’d never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe. There were clusters of freckles on her forearms and wrists, an entire Milky Way spreading across her forehead, even a few sputtering quasars flung into the wormholes of her ears. Since we’re in English class, let me quote a poem. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” which begins, “Glory be to God for dappled things.” When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheaded girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing in her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the gold highlights in the strawberry hair. It was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.

There is another call, the one that arrives the day when what once worked no longer does. Sometimes people need a shock; sometimes a tocsin call. It is time for a wake-up call. A man is fired from a job; a child runs away from home; ulcers overtake the body. The ancients called this “soul loss.” Today, the equivalent is the loss of meaning or purpose in our lives. There is a void where there should be what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “juice and joy.” The heart grows cold; life loses its vitality. Our accomplishments seem meaningless. As Tolstoy wrote in his Confessions, “Nothing ahead except ruins.” We seem to be in the thick of the forest without a road. “What, then, must we do?” The long line of myths, legends, poetry, and stories throughout the world tell us that it is at that moment of darkness that the call comes. It arrives in various forms—an itch, a fever, an offer, a ringing, an inspiration, an idea, a voice, words in a book that seem to have been written just for us—or a knock. THE KNOCK The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away. I'm looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling. —Robert Pirsig

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut, Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it? O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite, That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo, He comes to brood and sit.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’ THOU art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end? Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain, Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

The Leaden Echo How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away? Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep, Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey? No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none, Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair, Do what you may do, what, do what you may, And wisdom is early to despair: Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done To keep at bay Age and age’s evils, hoar hair, Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay; So be beginning, be beginning to despair. O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none: Be beginning to despair, to despair, Despair, despair, despair, despair.

Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World’s strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

This creative tension between wonderful and terrible is named so well by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as only poets can. Even the long title of his poem reveals his acceptance of the ever-changing flow of Heraclites and also his trust in the final outcome: “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.” Flesh fade, and mortal trash fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

...neither the weight nor the stress of sorrow, that is to say of the thing which should cause sorrow, by themselves move us or bring the tears as a sharp knife does not cut for being pressed as long as it is pressed without any shaking of the hand but there is always one touch, something striking sideways and unlooked for, which in both cases undoes resistance and pierces, and this may be so delicate that the pathos seems to have gone directly to the body and cleared the understanding in its passage.

All things counter, original, spare, strange...

The other loan was that of a book. The Headmaster came along, one day, and gave me a little blue book of poems. I looked at the name on the back. “Gerard Manley Hopkins.” I had never heard of him. But I opened the book, and read the “Starlight Night” and the Harvest poem and the most lavish and elaborate early poems. I noticed that the man was a Catholic and a priest and, what is more, a Jesuit.

.O let them be left, wildness and wet.

O let them be left, wildness and wet

I am soft sift 25 In an hourglass — at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall   30 Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life.

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

The beauty we find is from the comparison we make of the things with themselves, seeing their likeness and difference

Sempre desejei partir Para onde não faltam fontes Para campos sem gelo áspero em montes E onde há lírios a florir Poema Heaven-Haven, de Gerard Manley Hopkins

And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

Generaciones han pisado, pisado, pisado; y todo se ha chamuscado con la industria; empañado, manchado, con el trabajo; y lleva la suciedad del hombre, el olor del hombre: la tierra está desnuda, y el pie, calzado, ya no siente. Y con todo esto, la naturaleza nunca se agota, en el fondo de las cosas vive la muy amada lozanía; y aunque se perdieron las luces por el negro Oeste, ah, la mañana nace en el castaño umbral del Este.

...O if we but knew what to do When we delve or hew— Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being só slender,

...the sacramentality of the tragic in a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins or a depressive like Logan Runnalls: In his critique of disability studies, Logan holds the Weilian tension as his own confession: 'What I understand (in my vague way) disability studies to be doing is erasing the tension we find in life. I'm not comfortable thinking of my depression as in the realms of good or unflawed. And yet I now believe that this is a really important way that I bear the image of Christ. I too am a 'man of sorrows.' I do not want to get rid of the tension between depression as flaw and depression as way of bearing the image of God. Nor do I see any reason to be compelled to. To do so is to give up on loving the Other and settling for a weak justice.' Runnalls' tension is perfect commentary for Weil's amor fati and George Grant's theodicy of the Cross. His consent to God and to the reality of his depression becomes a means of grace in this world—or light in the cave.

Miss McTavish era una laureata di Bryn Mawr del '21, alta e mascolina, ed era segretamente convinta di essere l'unica in America a capire veramente la poesia di Gerard Manley Hopkins. Era anche convinta che il mondo accademico non fosse degno del vero Hopkins ed era quindi riluttante a parlare delle proprie teorie. Lo stesso senso di superiorità la teneva lontana dalle universitá. Non desiderava prendere parte alla cospirazione accademica contro la Vita e l'Arte. Lo stesso senso di superiorità, unito a un naso grottesco, la teneva lontana dal matrimonio. Sapeva che l'uomo sufficientemente appassionato, ribelle e giocoso per un'intima relazione spirituale con lei non era disponibile per la vita domestica, essendosi con tutta probabilità giá consacrato al monastero oppure all'alpinismo.

I am ashamed at the expression of high regard which your last letter and others have contained, kind and touching as they are, and do not know whether I ought to reply to them or not. This I say: my vocation puts before me a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else. The question then for me is not whether I am willing (if I may guess what is in your mind) to make a sacrifice of hopes of fame (let us suppose), but whether I am not to undergo a severe judgment from God for the lothness I have shewn in making it, for the reserves I may have in my heart made, for the backward glances I have given with my hand upon the plough, for the waste of time the very compositions you admire may have caused and their preoccupation of the mind which belonged to more sacred or more binding duties, for the disquiet and the thoughts of vainglory they have given rise to. A purpose may look smooth and perfect from without but be frayed and faltering from within. I have never wavered in my vocation, but I have not lived up to it. I destroyed the verse I had written when I entered the Society and meant to write no more; the Deutschland I began after a long interval at the chance suggestion of my superior, but that being done it is a question whether I did well to write anything else. However I shall, in my present mind, continue to compose, as occasion shall fairly allow, which I am afraid will be seldom and indeed for some years past has been scarcely ever, and let what I produce wait and take its chance; for a very spiritual man once told me that with things like composition the best sacrifice was not to destroy one’s work but to leave it entirely to be disposed of by obedience. But I can scarcely fancy myself asking a superior to publish a volume of my verses and I own that humanly there is very little likelihood of that ever coming to pass. And to be sure if I chose to look at things on one side and not the other I could of course regret this bitterly. But there is more peace and it is the holier lot to be unknown than to be known...

[...] He was afraid of being absorbed into Nature, engulfed by her, with irrevocable loss of his self; yet what he most dreaded, that also he most longed for. Mortal beauty, so Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is dangerous. If such individuals could take his advice to meet it, then let it alone, things would be easier. But it is just this which they cannot do.

Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas.

awareness of the divine, in large measure because of the intricate detail and difference of all creatures. He saw through a spiritual lens; while Darwin sought evidence of evolution and change, Gerard noted documentation of specialness, sameness, absolute identity in inscape and its effect on him: his response, generated by the inscape of the thing, he called “instress.” The term was almost musical, like a downbeat or rhythm or rest; the various and multifaceted forms of natural life clustered like notes on a ruled page of musical composition. He saw it, and he heard it. It was for him a great symphony composed of particularities, and so would his poetry become. For now, there were hints and foreshadowings in his prose.

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

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.

The nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called this inner terrain 'inscape.' And just as no landscape can flourish without sun and water, our inscape must be irrigated and drenched with many forms of life if we are to thrive.

Moonless darkness stands between. Past, the Past, no more be seen! But the Bethlehem-star may lead me To the sight of Him Who freed me From the self that I have been. Make me pure, Lord: Thou art holy; Make me meek, Lord: Thou wert lowly; Now beginning, and always: Now begin, on Christmas day.

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life Among strangers. Father and mother dear, Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near And he my peace, my parting and my strife. England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife To my creating thought, would neither hear Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I wear y of idle a being but by where wars are rife. I am in Ireland now; now I am at a thírd Remove. Not but in all removes I can Kind love both give and get. Only what word Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard, Hear unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.

I admire thee, master of the tides, Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall; The recurb and the recovery of the gulf's sides, The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall; Staunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind; Ground of being, and granite of it: past all Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides; With a mercy that outrides The all of water, an ark For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides Lower than death and the dark; A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison, The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark Our passion-plungèd giant risen, The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides. Now burn, new born to the world, Doubled-naturèd name, The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame, Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne! Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came; Kind, but royally reclaiming his own; A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled. Dame, at our door Drowned, and among our shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward: Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.

I have asked to be Where no storms come

It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day" I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light's delay. With witness I speak this. But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away. I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse. Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.

Leave comfort root-room.

I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

The child is father to the man.' How can he be? The words are wild. Suck any sense from that who can: ‘The child is father to the man.' No; what the poet did write ran, ‘The man is father to the child.' ‘The child is father to the man!' How can he be? The words are wild!

My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast...

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief." No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing — Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling- ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."' O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

The Caged Skylark AS a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells— That bird beyond the remembering his free fells; This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life’s age. Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage, 5 Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells, Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage. Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest— Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest, 10 But his own nest, wild nest, no prison. Man’s spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best, But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.

One could say that Hopkins practiced transubstantiation in every poem. By mysterious talent, he changed plain element into reality sublime. He encountered a jumble of weather, birds, trees, branches, waters, blooms, dewdrops, candle flames, prayers, then instressed them and, delighted, wrote in his journal, 'Chance left free toact falls into an order.

The Incarnation of Christ raised the energy of everything. And when Hopkins placed his conviction of this into poetry, he tended to mention electricity, lightening, fire, flash, flame. He wrote in his late, great poem, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the comfort of the Resurrection": 'In a flash, at a trumpet crash, / I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am and / This jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.

Into the snows she sweeps, Hurling the haven behind, The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps, For the infinite air is unkind, And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow, Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind; Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow Spins to the wido-making unchilding unfathering deeps. (from "The Wreck of the Deutschland, Part the Second")

In the book Swamplands of the Soul, I noted that in every swampland visitation we experience, there is always a task, the addressing of which can move us from victimage to active participation in the construction of our journey, and the flight from which invariably leads to the same old, same old. Or, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, to remain our own “sweating selves.