ah! bright wings

I suppose the advantage of failing to post any sonnets in the first half of the month is that I get to thematize them in the second half of the month. The other advantage is that I get to post some seriously badass sonnet-writers. I thought it was probably time for some 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 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.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "God's Grandeur." In manuscript, noted as "Standard rhythm counterpointed" and dated to February 23, 1877. It's actually a little weird that I haven't posted this one before, because I feel like it's way up there on the list of poems by Hopkins that people usually know. I love him a lot. This isn't even a sprung rhythm poem, but fuck me that enjambment. And the repetition and the alliteration and the rhyme punch, and seriously, like, I can just never get enough of how fucking brilliant a poet he was.