Gerard Manley Hopkins: God`s Grandeur. One of the good things about MOOC online poetry courses is that that make you focus on poems you know with more intensity and discover new poems. This is a poem I have read a few times but never really focused on for its daring use of language and poetic rule breaking. I had never noticed before its reference to industrial development where the poet also finds God. A sublime piece of work. The video allows Stanley Kunitz to describe the impact the poem had on him, life changing, before he gives a reading. God’s Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844 - 1889 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. https://youtube/watch?v=Rk5uiJFSSrM
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 15:45:19 +0000