Monday, July 23, 2018

Bent

I've been browsing through Affirmations of God and Man (1967), a collection of quotations where I have often found, or rediscovered, something I very much liked. The last two posts below were the result of things I read here. The final entry in the book is this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I post it here because it is so very good.

The Bent World
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.

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