Victorian Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

“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;                    5

  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;             10

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.

“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;        5

    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:            10

                  Praise him.