Gerard Manley Hopkins

“ O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. ”

“ _31 Spring and Fall:
to a young child_
MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for. ”

“ Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and water-blowballs, down.
We are there, when we hear a shout
That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover
Makes dither, makes hover
And the riot of a rout
Of, it must be, boys from the town
Bathing: it is summer's sovereign good.
By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise
He drops towards the river: unseen
Sees the bevy of them, how the boys
With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,
Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about. ”

“ This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal! ”

“ But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
⁠Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door. ”

“ And lapped in shining hair, roll to the bank's edge; then
Down the beetling banks, like water in waterfalls,
It stooped and flashed and fell and ran like water away.
Her eyes, oh and her eyes!
In all her beauty, and sunlight to it is a pit, den, darkness,
Foam-falling is not fresh to it, rainbow by it not beaming,
In all her body, I say, no place was like her eyes,
No piece matched those eyes kept most part much cast down
But, being lifted, immortal, of immortal brightness. ”

“ And right? Only resolution; will, his will unwavering
Who, like me, knowing his nature to the heart home, nature's business,
Despatches with no flinching. But will flesh, O can flesh
Second this fiery strain? Not always; O no no!
We cannot live this life out; sometimes we must weary
And in this darksome world what comfort can I find?
Down this darksome world cómfort whére can I find
When 'ts light I quenched; its rose, time's one rich rose, my hand,
By her bloom, fast by her fresh, her fleecèd bloom,
Hideous dashed down, leaving earth a winter withering
With no now, no Gwenvrewi. ”

“ but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.'
Obscurity As regards Oddity then, it is plain that the poet was Himself fully alive to it, but he was not sufficiently aware of obscurity, and he could not understand why his friends found his sentences so difficult: he would never have believed that, among all the ellipses and liberties of his grammar, the one chief cause is his habitual omission of the relative pronoun; ”

“ But presently I remember that this is all very well for those who are in, however low in, the Commonwealth and share in any way the common weal; but that the curse of our times is that many do not share it, that they are outcasts from it and have neither security nor splendour; that they share care with the high and obscurity with the low, but wealth or comfort with neither. ”

“ Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost ”

“ The thought is that as the seabird opening his wings with a whiff of wind in your face means the whirr of the motion, but also unaware gives you a whiff of knowledge about his plumage, the marking of which stamps his species, that he does not mean, so Purcell, seemingly intent only on the thought or feeling he is to express or call out, incidentally lets you remark the individualising marks of his own genius. ”

“ The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?
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⁠For how to the heart's cheering
⁠The down-dogged ground-hugged grey
⁠Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing
⁠Of pied and peeled May!
⁠Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,
⁠With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,
⁠What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing? ”

“ Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank
Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank—
⁠Head and foot, shoulder and shank—
By a grey eye's heed steered well, one crew, fall to;
Stand at stress. Each limb's barrowy brawn, his thew
That onewhere curded, onewhere sucked or sank—
⁠Soared or sank—,
Though as a beechbole firm, finds his, as at a rollcall, rank
And features, in flesh, what deed he each must do—
⁠His sinew-service where do. ”

“ The ruins of, rifled, once a world of art?
The telling time our task is; time's some part,
Not all, but we were framed to fail and die—
One spell and well that one. There, ah thereby
Is comfort's carol of all or woe's worst smart.
Field-flown the departed day no morning brings
Saying 'This was yours' with her, but new one, worse.
And then that last and shortest . . .
71
STRIKE, churl; hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail
May's beauty massacre and wispèd wild clouds grow
Out on the giant air; tell Summer No,
Bid joy back, have at the harvest, keep Hope pale. ”

“ PART THE FIRST 1
Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. ”

“ Exit Winefred.
No man has such a daughter. The fathers of the world
Call no such maiden 'mine'. The deeper grows her dearness
And more and more times laces round and round my heart,
The more some monstrous hand gropes with clammy fingers there,
Tampering with those sweet bines, draws them out, strains them, strains them;
Meantime some tongue cries 'What, Teryth! what, thou poor fond father!
How when this bloom, this honeysuckle, that rides the air so rich about thee,
Is all, all sheared away, thus!' Then I sweat for fear. ”

“ I repent of what I did.
Bad I am, but yet thy child.
Father, be thou reconciled.
Spare thou me, since I see
With thy might that thou art mild.
I have life before me still
And thy purpose to fulfil ”

“ What is Spring?—
⁠Growth in every thing—
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
⁠Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
⁠Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within ”

“ Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air,
Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there,
Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots
Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! ”

“ With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
Men go by me whom either beauty bright
⁠In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
⁠They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite. ”

“ May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. ”

“ Mend first and vital candle in close heart's vault:
You there are master, do your own desire;
What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault
In a neighbour deft-handed? Are you that liar
And cast by conscience out, spend savour salt? ”

“ To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.
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⁠Away in the loveable west,
⁠On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
⁠I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
⁠And they the prey of the gales;
⁠She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
⁠Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails
⁠Was calling 'O Christ, Christ, come quickly.':
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best. ”

“ All the air things wear that build this world of Wales;
⁠Only the inmate does not correspond:
God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,
Complete thy creature dear O where it fails,
⁠Being mighty a master, being a father and fond. ”

“ Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.
Or what is else? There is your world within. ”

“ Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?
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⁠Into the snows she sweeps,
⁠Hurling the haven behind,
⁠The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,
⁠For the infinite air is unkind,
⁠And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
⁠Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
⁠Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps. ”

“ These things, these things were here and but the beholder
⁠Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
⁠And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet. ”

“ What the heart is! which, like carriers let fly—
Doff darkness, homing nature knows the rest—
To its own fine function, wild and self-instressed,
Falls light as ten years long taught how to and why. ”

“ Lilies I shew you, lilies none,
None in Caesar's gardens blow,—
And a quince in hand,—not one
Is set upon your boughs below;
Not set, because their buds not spring;
Spring not, 'cause world is wintering. ”

“ A Brother and Sister
O I admire and sorrow! The heart's eye grieves
Discovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years.
A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves,
And beauty's dearest veriest vein is tears. ”

“ I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, | in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe | of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, | lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, | of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, | entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, | unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, | eyelid and eyelid of slumber. ”

“ With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
⁠I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst 's all-in-all in all a world of wet. ”

“ The vault and scope and schooling
And mastery in the mind,
In silk-ash kept from cooling,
And ripest under rind—
What life half lifts the latch of,
What hell stalks towards the snatch of,
Your offering, with despatch, of! ”

“ And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. ”

“ Shrewsbury may see others keep;
⁠None but you this her true,
This her Silver Jubilee.
4
Not today we need lament
Your wealth of life is some way spent:
⁠Toil has shed round your head
Silver but for Jubilee. ”

“ Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
⁠Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse. ”

“ All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks
Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp
Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots
Fast he opens, last he offwrings
Till walk the world he can with bare his feet
And come where lies a coffer, burly all of blocks
Built of chancequarrièd, selfquainèd rocks
And the water warbles over into, filleted with glassy grassy
quicksilvery shivès and shoots
And with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still brims,
Dark or daylight on and on. ”