NPQiYBM

[cahn]

Hmph, February is almost over and I have not posted half as many quotations as I would have liked. Well, here is a sonnet by my favorite poet:

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.

And 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.

ETA: Gerard Manley Hopkins, as julianyap guessed.

Comments

[julianyap.livejournal.com]

This can only be Gerald Manley Hopkins

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Yes!

[julianyap.livejournal.com]

Okay, so it took me a while to dig this up, but because this sonnet reminded me about it, I now inflict on you a poem I once scribbled together which mentions Hopkins:

Sonnet

I wonder what Petrach would have written
Had he lived in a different time or place
It is, perhaps, too much a stretch to claim
He would have chosen free verse to pen
But perhaps Spenser’s stanzas would have served
To satisfy his love of form
Or terza rima, or something else
With more freedom and a bit more space

Or would he have stayed
With his fourteen lines
Six below and eight above
Writing the way that Hopkins prayed:
Penciled verse of God’s design
The rigid structures of his love

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

I like the changing meter :) Also "the rigid structures of his love" -- yes, that captures something important about Hopkins.

(What this reminds me of: Do you remember the part in Wrinkle in Time where one of the Mrs.'s talks about sonnets, and how they are like life-- I had no idea what a sonnet was before reading that book in the second grade or whenever it was, but it's informed my view of sonnets forever after.)