Memory and Message of God’s Grandeur

       Today is the anniversary of Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ death in 1889. Seeing a reminder of this fact brought to mind a poem of his that was shared with our class in high school many years ago. Perhaps you had this experience too:

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 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.

       This is probably the only poem of Father Hopkins that I half-way understand. Like abstract art, it conveys to me reality through the feelings, the images he names with such care. This piece makes me feel awe at the beauty and indestructibility of this World (NB: He capitalizes the word in the ending verse unlike the beginning verse.) At the same time the realism of “man’s smudge” and “smell” does not allow me to avoid my responsibility of caring for creation.

       Thank you, Gerard Manley Hopkins for the beauty and hope you have given us!

       Sr. Dorothy Schuette, OSB