Jim, Thanks so much for the poems--
I have always loved two others, by Hopkins, also-----
God's Grandeur
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
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(I can often see and feel the "Ah, bright wings" of the Holy Spirit---for now, with my spiritual eyes, thru that "glass darkly", but SOON--face-to-face! Thank You, Lord!! )
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Pied Beauty
- 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;
- Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches' wings;
- Landscape plotted and pieced, fold, fallow and plough,
- And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
- All things counter, original, spare, strange,
- Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
- With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.
- He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
- Praise him.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
(Thank You, Lord, for "fathering-forth" each of us!)
In His Love, Jan in AZ