A Couple Poems

Musing on stars made me think of one of my favorite poets. I'm sure most people who know me would assume I'm talking about my dear friend, mentor and guide, Will Shakespeare. But the person I'm talking about is a more recently deceased dead white man (I'm not prejudiced, I just seem to have this thing with falling for dead white guys more often than the living guys of any race). The fellow whose poems I'm going to put in this entry is a well-educated Brit and a man of the cloth. Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of my favorite poets...right up there with Will and George Herbert. A fair amount of the poetry I love ends up being spiritual in nature. Hopkins and Herbert are both amazing men, but there are two poems by Hopkins I'm going to put down because they remind me somehow of the amazing stars.

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.

If this has whetted your appetite for some amazing poetry, you can read more at: http://www.bartleby.com/people/HopkinsG.html

Okay, I better finish some work up...reality is, unfortunately, interrupting my musing.