Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
1877 1918
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!0 the elves'-eyes! quarries
5 The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold;1 lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles0 set on a flare! white poplars 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, io Look, look: a May-mess,2 like on orchard boughs!
I. Hopkins explained this image in a letter: 'I 2. I.e., from the crushing of olives. mean foil in its sense of leaf or tinsel. . . . Shaken 1. Coined by analogy with quicksilver. The stargoldfoil gives off broad glares like sheet lightning light night resembles the lawns below it, where the and also, and this is true of nothing else, owing to dew, reflecting the starlight, looks like gold. its zigzag dints and creasings and network of small 2. A profusion of growing things such as May blosmany cornered facets, a sort of fork lightning too.' soms.
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SPRING / 1517
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!3 These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling4 shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.0 saints 1877 1918
As Kingfishers Catch Fire
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked0 string tells, each hung bell's plucked
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
5 Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors0 each one dwells; within Selves'?goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;2 io Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is? Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.
1877 1918
Spring
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring? When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
5 The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy? io A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden.?Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid's child,1 thy choice and worthy the winning.
1877 1918
3. Willows, here with yellow spots like meal. 2. Acts in a just manner. 4. Picket fence. 'Shocks': sheaves of grain. 1. Jesus, son of the Virgin Mary. J. Fulfills its individuality.
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15 18 / GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
The Windhover1
To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning's minion,' king-darling dom of daylight's dauphin,2 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 how-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!4 AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!0 knight
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion5 Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall6 themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
1877 1918
Pied1 Beauty
