God's Grandeur

God's Grandeur

by Gerard Manley Hopkins



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 the warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
All things counter, original, spare, strange,
Whatever is fickle, freckled, who knows how
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers forth whose beauty is past change.
Praise him.