Gerard Manley Hopkins : 20 poems

'The  child is father to the man.'

'The child is father to the man.'

How can he be? The words are wild.

Suck any sense from that who can:

'The child is father to the man.'

No; what the poet did write ran,

'The man is father to the child.'

'The child is father to the man!'

How can he be? The words are wild!

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

   O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

   The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

   Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!

   Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows.

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

   Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

   Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

The Candle Indoors

Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by.

I muse at how its being puts blissful back

With yellowy moisture mild night’s blear-all black,

Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye.

By that window what task what fingers ply,

I plod wondering, a-wanting, just for lack

Of answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack

There God to aggrándise, God to glorify.—

Come you indoors, come home; your fading fire

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, spendsavour salt?

It was a hard thing to undo this knot

 It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

The rainbow shines, but only in the thought

Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,

For who makes rainbows by invention?

And many standing round a waterfall

See one bow each, yet not the same to all,

But each a hand's breadth further than the next.

The sun on falling waters writes the text

Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less

  

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; 

The times are winter, watch, a world undone: 

They waste, they wither worse; they as they run 

Or bring more or more blazon man's distress. 

And I not help. 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. 

There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.  

Your will is law in that small commonweal...

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?

Ah! 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 will 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 ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

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 all trades, 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.

Felix Randal

Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,

Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome

Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some

Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended

Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some

Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom

Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

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!

Binsey Poplars

Felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled;

Of a fresh and following folded rank

Not spared, not one

That dandled a sandalled

Shadow that swam or sank

On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

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 so 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.

Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve

Strokes of havoc unselve

The sweet especial scene,

Rural scene, a rural scene,

Sweet especial rural scene.

The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

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: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

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.

On The Portrait Of Two Beautiful Young People

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.

Happy the father, mother of these! Too fast:

Not that, but thus far, all with frailty, blest

In one fair fall; but, for time’s aftercast,

Creatures all heft, hope, hazard, interest.

And are they thus? The fine, the fingering beams

Their young delightful hour do feature down

That fleeted else like day-dissolvèd dreams

Or ringlet-race on burling Barrow brown.

She leans on him with such contentment fond

As well the sister sits, would well the wife;

His looks, the soul’s own letters, see beyond,

Gaze on, and fall directly forth on life.

But ah, bright forelock, cluster that you are

Of favoured make and mind and health and youth,

Where lies your landmark, seamark, or soul’s star?

There’s none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth.

There ’s none but good can bé good, both for you

And what sways with you, maybe this sweet maid;

None good but God—a warning wavèd to

One once that was found wanting when Good weighed.

Man lives that list, that leaning in the will

No wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess,

The selfless self of self, most strange, most still,

Fast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes.

Your feast of; that most in you earnest eye

May but call on your banes to more carouse.

Worst will the best. What worm was here, we cry,

To have havoc-pocked so, see, the hung-heavenward boughs?

Enough: corruption was the world’s first woe.

What need I strain my heart beyond my ken?

O but I bear my burning witness though

Against the wild and wanton work of men.

. . . . . . .

Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous

Evening strains to be time’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.

Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height

Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us,

Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being as unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-

tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steepèd and páshed – quite

Disremembering, dísmémbering, ' áll now. Heart, you round me right

With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,

Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind

Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety ' upon áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck

Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds – black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind

But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack

Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd

To what serves mortal beauty

   

To what serves mortal beauty ' —dangerous; does set danc-

ing blood—the O-seal-that-so ' feature, flung prouder form

Than Purcell tune lets tread to? ' See: it does this: keeps warm

Men’s wits to the things that are; ' what good means—where a glance

Master more may than gaze, ' gaze out of countenance.

Those lovely lads once, wet-fresh ' windfalls of war’s storm,

How then should Gregory, a father, ' have gleanèd else from swarm-

ed Rome? But God to a nation ' dealt that day’s dear chance.

To man, that needs would worship ' block or barren stone,

Our law says: Love what are ' love’s worthiest, were all known;

World’s loveliest—men’s selves. Self ' flashes off frame and face.

What do then? how meet beauty? ' Merely meet it; own,

Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; ' then leave, let that alone.

Yea, wish that though, wish all, ' God’s better beauty, grace.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

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.

Carrion Comfort

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

In me ór, 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 right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

   Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród

Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

My own heart let me more have pity on

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

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.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather — as skies

Betweenpie mountains — lights a lovely mile.

No worst, there is none

 No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief{\-}

Woe, w{'o}rld-sorrow; on an {'a}ge-old {'a}nvil w{'i}nce and s{'i}ng --

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked "No ling-

Ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

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.

Patience, hard thing

Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,

But bid for, patience is! Patience who asks

Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;

To do without, take tosses, and obey.

Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,

No-where. Natural heart's-ivy Patience masks

Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks

Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.

We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills

To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills

Of us wé do bid God bend to him even so.

And where is he who more and more distills

Delicious Kindness? - He is patient. Patience fills

His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.

To seem the stranger

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life

Among strangers. Father and mother dear,

Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near

And he my peace/my parting, sword and strife.

England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife

To my creating thought, would neither hear

Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I weár-

Y of idle a being but by where wars are rife.

I am in Ireland now; now I am at a thírd

Remove. Not but in all removes I can

Kind love both give and get. Only what word

Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven's baffling ban

Bars or hell's spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,

Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.

The ‘Terrible Sonnets’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Spirituality of Depression. By Hilary E. Pearson.  The Way, 2007. 

Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. He was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, in 1863, where he studied Classics.

In 1864, Hopkins first read John Henry Newman's Apologia pro via sua, which discussed the author's reasons for converting to Catholicism. Two years later, Newman himself received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church. Hopkins soon decided to become a priest himself, and in 1867 he entered a Jesuit novitiate near London. At that time, he vowed to "write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors." Hopkins burnt all of the poetry he had written to date and would not write poems again until 1875. He spent nine years in training at various Jesuit houses throughout England. He was ordained in 1877 and for the next seven years carried his duties teaching and preaching in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst.

In 1875, Hopkins began to write again after a German ship, the Deutschland, was wrecked during a storm at the mouth of the Thames River. Many of the passengers, including five Franciscan nuns, died. Although conventional in theme, Hopkins poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland" introduced what Hopkins called "sprung rhythm." By not limiting the number of "slack" or unaccented syllables, Hopkins allowed for more flexibility in his lines and created new acoustic possibilities. In 1884, he became a professor of Greek at the Royal University College in Dublin. He died five years later from typhoid fever. Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins's Poems that first appeared in 1918.

In addition to developing new rhythmic effects, Hopkins was also very interested in ways of rejuvenating poetic language. He regularly placed familiar words into new and surprising contexts. He also often employed compound and unusual word combinations. As he wrote to in a letter to Bridges, "No doubt, my poetry errs on the side of oddness…" Twentieth century poets such as W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Charles Wright have enthusiastically turned to his work for its inventiveness and rich aural patterning.

 Poets.org

Poems here : Poets.org

Essay and poems here : Poetry Foundation

The Hopkins Society

Official Gerard Manley Hopkins Website

Hopkins  Festival  Newbridge 2020