Foresight: Deep Down Things

Photo: Justin Thompson

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'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.

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Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was an English poet and a Jesuit priest.