built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
1885 1918
That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire1 and of the Comfort of the Resurrection
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy0 race on an air- built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers,0 in gay-gangs | they swaggerers
throng; they glitter in marches. Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches. Shivelights and shadowtackle2 in long | lashes lace, lance, and pair. Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut peel parches3 Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches Squadroned masks and manmarks4 | treadmire toil there Footfretted in it. Million-fueled, | nature's bonfire burns on. But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selved0 most individual
spark Man, how fast his firedint | his mark on mind, is gone! Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone Sheer off, disseveral,0 a star, | death blots black out; nor mark separate
Is any of him at all so stark But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection, A heart's- clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood,5 immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
1888 1918
1. Letters undelivered or returned to the sender rigging. 'Shivelights': strips of light. by the post office. 3. Ruts described as peeled places. 'Parches' is a 1. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (fl. ca. 500 verb whose subject is wind. B.C.E.) taught that all things are in flux and that 4. The marks that people have made on the earth they ultimately return to the basic principle of fire. by walking ('footfretted') on it. 2. Branches imagined as the shadows of a ship's 5. Kindling. 'Jack': ordinary man.
.
15 18 / GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Thou art indeed just, Lord
Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.1
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
5 Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes0 thickets
io Now, leaved how thick! laced they are again
With fretty chervil,2 look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build?but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
1889 1918
From Journal1
May 3 [1866], Cold. Morning raw and wet, afternoon fine. Walked then with Addis, crossing Bablock Hythe, round by Skinner's Weir2 through many fields into the Witney road. Sky sleepy blue without liquidity. From Cumnor Hill saw St. Philip's and the other spires through blue haze rising pale in a pink light. On further side of the Witney road hills, just fleeced with grain or other green growth, by their dips and waves foreshortened here and there and so differenced in brightness and opacity the green on them, with delicate effect. On left, brow of the near hill glistening with very bright newly turned sods and a scarf of vivid green slanting away beyond the skyline, against which the clouds shewed the slightest tinge of rose or purple. Copses in grey-red or grey-yellow?the tinges immediately forerunning the opening of full leaf. Meadows skirting Seven-bridge road voluptuous green. Some oaks are out in small leaf. Ashes not out, only tufted with their fringy blooms. Hedges springing richly. Elms in small leaf, with more or less opacity. White poplars most beautiful in small grey crisp spray-like leaf. Cowslips capriciously colouring meadows in creamy drifts. Bluebells, purple orchis. Over the green
1. 'Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with acter of his imagination. The brackets and thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: abbreviations are Hopkins's. Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?' 2. Dam. William E. Addis (1844-1917), friend of (Jeremiah 12.1). The Latin was Hopkins's title. Hopkins at Oxford; like him he became a Catholic 2. A kind of herb, related to parsley. convert and priest. The places mentioned are I. With the exception of one year, Hopkins kept a around Oxford. Compare Matthew Arnold's evojournal from May 1866 to Feb. 1875. Its most cation of this same landscape in 'The Scholar interesting entries are minutely observed descrip-Gypsy' (p. 1361). tions of natural phenomena, which reveal the char
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