Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889)
Jesuit priest and English poet whose posthumous, 20th-century fame established him among the finest Victorian poets.
Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-fixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Beauty ... is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.
I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.
It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty.
For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great.
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
I find myself both as man and as myself something more determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see.
A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree.
By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind.
You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest.
Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.
The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one.
For human nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and distinctive than anything in the world, can have been developed, evolved, condensed, from the vastness of the world not anyhow or by the working of common powers but only by one of finer or higher pitch and determination than itself.
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!
My own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
Poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour.
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.