September 1: Dreary Grandeur, Poet of the Week, Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"

Even on days like today, rainy and misty and dark, there's a certain dreary grandeur in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The maple trees on my street are already starting to color.  Half-orange, half-green.  In this weather, the brilliance is tempered to a dull rust.  But it's still beautiful.  Autumn has always been my favorite season.

I have chosen Gerard Manley Hopkins as the Poet of the Week.  Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who renounced his youthful poetic aspirations when he entered the Society of Jesus in 1877 and "resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wish of my superiors."  The result of this decision was a body of work unique in language, beautiful in image, stunning in spiritual depth.

A warning:  Hopkins' poems are not easy.  The sonnets are strange in their sprung rhythm.  The images are linguistically dense.  But, when I read his work, he transports me to places of great joy and, sometimes, arid despair.

I have chosen to start with one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' most famous poems.  It is electrically transcendent, full of awe and thankfulness.

It makes Saint Marty humble, and that's a hard thing to do.

God's Grandeur

by:  Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

ah! bright wings