Whenever I go for a walk on a particularly marvelously beautiful day, snippets of this Gerard Manley Hopkins poem get stuck in my head. I love the way each line rolls off the tongue. Every word is exactly right.
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| 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; |
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| 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. | |
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| And for all this, nature is never spent; | |
| There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; |
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| 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. | |
3 comments:
Me too! I explicated it freshman year and it's been just below the surface of my mind constantly since then.
I wrote my favorite test essay on that poem! I think I am at the point where with a pencil and paper and sufficient time I could possibly write it down, but I get stuck at certain places...
Everything by Hopkins is beautiful, but that is one of my favorites, too.
Reading your blog makes me realize that I am not one of a kind. hehe...I didn't know other people had that poem stuck in their heads whenever they went on walks. :-)
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