Monday – Autumn colors

Monday October 21

Here’s another Gerard Manley Hopkins, maybe my favorite — exulting in autumn stirs my blood every year about now; leaves reaching to catch my attention and open me to stillness in the middle of a day’s hustle. You too, I hope.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

14. Hurrahing in Harvest

SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

 

john sj

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