February 5, 2013

Gerard Manley Hopkins - God's Grandeur


YouTube Video Description - [Channel: poetictouch2012]:
Paul Webster recites Hopkins's poem God's Grandeur - From the 1986 Everyman documentary To Seem The Stranger - Profile of the life and work of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

God's Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

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.