Poem of the Week: For all this, nature is never spent

Poor Gerard Manley Hopkins. He’s frequently anthologized, yet I get the feeling people read his poems and go “Wha. . . .?”

So he was a manic-depressive repressed Jesuit who invented his own words, rhythm and poetic theory. So his overt religious agenda can be a bit preachy. If you get through that, his poems are refreshingly short, sweet, and downright fun to recite.

Yesterday’s talk of birds got me thinking of this Hopkins poem, which must take the prize for most over-the-top poetic bird metaphor (unless his “Windhover” did first). I memorized it almost ten years ago, and still remember the whole thing. Ah, the mnemonic power of sprung rhythm and alliteration. Definitely read this one aloud.

(And let’s hope he was right that “nature is never spent” – because our species is pushing it.)

God’s Grandeur
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.