Gerard Hopkins
Gerard Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins SJwas an English poet, convert to Catholicism, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosodyand his use of imagery established him after his death as an innovative writer of religious verse...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 July 1844
lost scourge sweating
I see / The lost are like this, and their scourge to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
creation lines miss
O then if in my lagging lines you miss / The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.
cheap cliffs fall hold hung mind
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne'er hung there.
birds breed build lord roots send thou work
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.
achieve mastery
The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
desired few fields flies hail sharp springs
I have desired to go / Where springs not fail, / To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail / And a few lilies blow,
art contend endeavour indeed plead thou ways
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?
green storms swing
Where no storms come, / Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, / And out of the swing of the sea.
bereft nature weeds wet wilderness wildness
What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left. O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
darkness lay wrestling wretch year
That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
christ mother spouse
This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse / Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
dearest deep freshness lives
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things . . . ,
ball beauty cannot country eye growing guess hack knew mean mend rack seeing since tender
O if we but knew what we do when we delve or hew -- hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender to touch, her being so slender, that like this sleek and seeing ball but a prick will make no eye at all, where we, even where we mean to mend her we end her, when we hew or delve: after-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
few sprung various
A few other little things; some in sprung rhythm, with various other experiments.