Three Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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
áll trádes, 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
God's Grandeur
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.
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
Whát
I dó is me: for that I came.
I
say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps
grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts
in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst
— 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.
