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 & 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 & with ah! bright wings.
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 & 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 & with ah! bright wings.
The other day I took the long way home, my little car winding through rolling hills, budding woodlands, fields of dewy green. I looked up and saw a deer springing off through the grasses, full of energy and of life, and it came over me:
In the realm of nature, little has changed since time began. To the deer, this could be any century. Only human beings have bent time into a thing of fashion, mapping out the hours, the weeks, the towns and cities, the toll roads plowing through the forests, the togas in that millennium, the business-casual khaki slacks in this one.
And sometimes nature suffers from our brusque ownership, but more often, nature astonishes us by conquering our temporal constructions with its eternal anonymity. And the grandeur of God shines.
In the realm of nature, little has changed since time began. To the deer, this could be any century. Only human beings have bent time into a thing of fashion, mapping out the hours, the weeks, the towns and cities, the toll roads plowing through the forests, the togas in that millennium, the business-casual khaki slacks in this one.
And sometimes nature suffers from our brusque ownership, but more often, nature astonishes us by conquering our temporal constructions with its eternal anonymity. And the grandeur of God shines.
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