Hopkins: The world is charged...

Tuesday, July 14, 2020
    Feast of John Keble, Priest, Poet, Tractarian, 1866
Meditation:
    All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
    —Ecclesiastes 1:8-9 (NIV)
Quotation:
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 ah! bright wings.
    ... Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Penguin Classics, 1953, p. 27 (see the book)
    See also Gen. 1:2; Eccl. 1:8-9; 2:16-18; John 15:26
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, You are present in Your world!

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