Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Some day I will memorize this

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.


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.

3 comments:

Sarah said...

Me too! I explicated it freshman year and it's been just below the surface of my mind constantly since then.

Kaitebon said...

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.

Kaitebon said...

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. :-)