God's Grandeur

Sadly, for this entry, I completely cop out and instead of blogging, will share with you one of my favorite poems.  I love to read this one aloud.

  

             God’s Grandeur

     Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

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.

My favorite line is the depiction of the working man as relentless toil: have trod, have trod, have trod.  Even the words roll awkwardly off the tongue.  The first stanza depicts life on this ecclesiastical earth, and hope answers in the second stanza.  The last line of the poems merits reading aloud the crucial "ah!"   SAVOR!