I was speaking to a friend this morning out in our garden. Actually she had come to tend the garden for me….such a blessing as I don’t always have time or energy these days.
I happened to walk outside without anything on my feet and she remarked that it was good to see that. It was a way to be “earthed”. I asked her whether she knew the poem by Gérard Manley Hopkins called The Grandeur of God? When she said that she didn’t I tried to summarise it but then said I would share it with her.
As I haven’t posted a blog for ages, I thought I would have a go, so others could read it, too. I’m using my phone to write it and it doesn’t seem to work as well as my laptop but I’ve pressed on.
So, bless you all, dear friends, and here’s the poem.
God's Grandeur
BY GERARD MANLEY 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.
Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)
The Bakery 