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
answer god jack lack
Just for lack / Of answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack / There God to aggrandize, God to glorify.
glory god skies swim trout
Glory be to God for dappled things for skies of couple-color as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim
green storms swing
Where no storms come, / Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, / And out of the swing of the sea.
bright fire sitting
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!
achieve mastery
The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
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.
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 . . . ,
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.
few sprung various
A few other little things; some in sprung rhythm, with various other experiments.
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.
darkness lay wrestling wretch year
That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.