Gerard Hopkins
Gerard Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins SJwas an English poet, convert to Catholicism, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosodyand his use of imagery established him after his death as an innovative writer of religious verse...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 July 1844
answer god jack lack
Just for lack / Of answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack / There God to aggrandize, God to glorify.
bright fire sitting
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!/ O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! / The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
art contend endeavour indeed plead thou ways
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend / With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. / Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must / Disappointment all I endeavour end?
bereft nature weeds wet wilderness wildness
What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left. O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
green storms swing
Where no storms come, / Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, / And out of the swing of the sea.
glory god skies swim trout
Glory be to God for dappled things for skies of couple-color as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim
desired few fields flies hail sharp springs
I have desired to go / Where springs not fail, / To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail / And a few lilies blow,
birds breed build lord roots send thou work
Birds build - but not I build; no, but strain,/ Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. / Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
lost scourge sweating
I see / The lost are like this, and their scourge to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
creation lines miss
O then if in my lagging lines you miss / The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.
cheap cliffs fall hold hung mind
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne'er hung there.
few sprung various
A few other little things; some in sprung rhythm, with various other experiments.
christ mother spouse
This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse / Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
dearest deep freshness lives
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things . . . ,