This is my absolute favourite ever.
Oh I love this because the poem says so clearly that despite humankind’s influence on this world, however much we have trod and trod and smeared, spoiled and traded; nature is still not spent (finished). And how the Holy Ghost (Spirit) broods and watches over us all with ‘bright wings’. This is a promise from God that through all that we do, and all that we destroy, He sends part of Himself to love and care for us all; eventually rescuing us from ourselves and the havoc we are reeking on this beautiful, fragile world. In essence, the poem tells me how passionately our Almighty God (Elohim) loves us all sooooh much. I guess you can tell this poem sums up how much I am in love with our Triune God, my very own Abba. Blessings, Jennie.? PS: The county of Clwyd, now called Flintshire, in North Wales, is a place of outstanding natural beauty and the place where the poet wrote his odes to God’s nature.
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.
Gerald Manley Hopkins 1844 – 1889
The Audio – see YouTube Link for reading by Samuel West, who
Gerard Manley Hopkins is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the Victorian era. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I. Hopkins’s family encouraged his artistic talents when he was a youth in Essex, England. However, Hopkins became estranged from his Protestant family when he converted to Roman Catholicism. Upon deciding to become a priest, he burned all of his poems and did not write again for many years. His work was not published until 30 years after his death when his friend Robert Bridges edited the volume Poems. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gerard-manley-hopkins
