captainboastalot asked:

So happy you like Gerard Manley Hopkins too! He was one of my favourite poets to teach (and read). His work sure needs more love!

Gosh, yes. I hear the words in my head, and they just spiral along the synapses. He knew the beauty of language itself. He was an odd little duck. I wish I could have met him.

“Easter Communion”

[fiquin]

Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast:
God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.
You striped in secret with breath-taking whips,
Those crooked rough-scored chequers may be pieced
To crosses meant for Jesu’s; you whom the East
With draught of thin and pursuant cold so nips
Breathe Easter now; you serged fellowships,
You vigil-keepers with low flames decreased,

God shall o’er-brim the measures you have spent
With oil of gladness, for sackcloth and frieze
And the ever-fretting shirt of punishment
Give myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease.
Your scarce-sheathed bones are weary of being bent:
Lo, God shall strengthen all the feeble knees.
: Gerard Manley Hopkins 

[altarandhour]

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
   dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
   Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
   As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend; the hurl and gliding
   Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover”

[ullamvindur]

Pied Beauty
By Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

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.

The Woodlark

[maaritola]

Teevo cheevo cheevio chee:

O where, what can thát be?

Weedio-weedio: there again!

So tiny a trickle of sóng-strain

And all round not to be found

For brier, bough, furrow, or gréen ground

Before or behind or far or at hand

Either left either right

Anywhere in the súnlight.

Well, after all! Ah but hark—

'I am the little wóodlark.

Today the sky is two and two

With white strokes and strains of the blue

Round a ring, around a ring

And while I sail (must listen) I sing

The skylark is my cousin and he

Is known to men more than me

… when the cry within

Says Go on then I go on

Till the longing is less and the good gone

But down drop, if it says Stop,

To the all-a-leaf of the tréetop

And after that off the bough

I ám so véry, O só very glád

That I dó thínk there is not to be had

The blue wheat-acre is underneath

And the corn is corded and shoulders its sheaf,

The ear in milk, lush the sash,

And crusk-silk poppies aflash,

The blood-gush blade-gash

Flame-rash rudred

Bud shelling or broad-shed

Tatter-tangled and dingle-a-danglèd

Dandy-hung dainty head.

And down … the furrow dry

Sunspurge and oxeye

And lace-leaved lovely

Foam-tuft fumitory

Through the velvety wind V-winged

To the nest’s nook I balance and buoy

With a sweet joy of a sweet joy,

Sweet, of a sweet, of a sweet joy

Of a sweet—a sweet—sweet—joy.’

altarandhour.tumblr.com

[altarandhour]

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more, I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world...

Hopkins says that the image of “shook foil” was inspired by “tinsel,” metal “leaf,” and “sheet lightening,” and “fork lightening.” (Letter to Robert Bridges)

God’s Grandeur: Stanza I Summary

Oh.

Good. Okay. Now I know. Now I can die.

evalilith replied to your post “sssibilance, I’m now on a Gerard Manley Hopkins binge. I’m shining…”

Yess he uses so much alliteration- that was like half of my paper on one of his poems freshman year, just why he was using different sounds for different parts of the poem.

Oooh. That sounds like a delightful crunchy read. /props chin up on hands

Did you ever get sick of him? Did you ever just get like oh my god gmh stfu or is it physically impossible to get sick of him? 

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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” (via invisibleforeigner)