Monday, March 7  —   “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”

When students disembark for a week, their campus breathes in a more relaxed fashion;  lots of employees can turn from work-day jobs to their pile of longer term tasks that always form a backdrop to their “do this NOW” stuff.

It’s a joy, too, to wake to elegant, spring-like sunshine offering powder blue air all around.  Warmer too,  Weather.com says 59º this afternoon.

There may be no better poem for such an inviting morning than “God’s Grandeur.”  As with every strong poet, every word matters.  If you live in Detroit or any other place where the sun colors everything outside today, you might try reading this G. M. Hopkins, sj masterpiece from some place where you can see the sky.

Blessings on your week.

john sj

God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844 – 1889

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, sj 1844-1889