greykit.poetry — Gerard Manley Hopkins
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame
Everything mortal does one thing — selves, goes itself, cries What I do is me — and the sestet turns that on the just man, in whose limbs and eyes Christ plays in ten thousand places.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Binsey Poplars
My aspens dear, all felled — and the grief is not only for the trees but for how easily a country scene is unmade: ten or twelve strokes and the sweet especial scene is gone.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Carrion Comfort
One of the terrible sonnets: a refusal to feast on despair, and a wrestling match with a lion-limbed God that the speaker only afterwards realises he was cheering — that night, that year of now done darkness, I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Felix Randal
A priest's elegy for a farrier he anointed — the big-boned and hardy-handsome man broken by sickness, tears touched by a child's touch, and at the last the great grey drayhorse and the bright and battering sandal.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God — yet men sear and smear the soil, shod from feeling it; and yet the Holy Ghost broods over the bent world with warm breast and bright wings.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Pied Beauty
A curtal sonnet of thanksgiving for dappled things — brinded skies, rose-moles on trout, finches' wings, landscape plotted and pieced — all fathered-forth by a beauty past change.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Spring and Fall: to a young child
Hopkins asks Márgarét, weeping at Goldengrove's unleaving, whether she grieves for the world or for herself — sorrow's springs are the same; it is the blight man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
The Windhover
Watching a kestrel ride the morning wind, Hopkins finds mastery — the achieve of the thing — that buckles into the beauty of Christ; even the plough-share, shéer plód, flashes gold-vermillion.