A poem by Hopkins

Last term at school we each memorized 35+ lines of poetry for our rhetoric class, and I chose Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 and became a priest.

If he's a little hard to understand, his choice of wonderful words makes up for it!

God's Grandeur
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.

Yet 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.