Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Now First Published — John Shaqi
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Now First PublishedHopkins, Gerard Manley
General
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Now First Published
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
Poetry
24
Away in the loveable west,
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And they the prey of the gales;
She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails,
Was calling 'O Christ, Christ come quickly':
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worn Best.
25
The majesty! what did she mean?
Breathe, arch and original Breath.
Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been?
Breathe, body of lovely Death.
They were else-minded then, altogether, the men
Woke thee with a _we are perishlng_ in the weather of Gennesareth.
Or is it that she cried for the crown then,
The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?
26
For how to the heart's cheering
The down-dogged ground-hugged grey
Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing
Of pied and peeled May!
Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,
With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,
What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for
the hearing?
27
No, but it was not these.
The jading and jar of the cart,
Time's tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease
Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart,
Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds
The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart:
Other, I gather, in measure her mind's
Burden, in wind's burly and beat of endragoned seas.
28
But how shall I ... make me room there;
Reach me a ... Fancy, come faster--
Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there,
Thing that she ... there then! the Master,
_Ipse_, the only one, Christ, King, Head:
He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her;
Do, deal, lord it with living and dead;
Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done
with his doom there.
29
Ah! there was a heart right!
There was single eye!
Read the unshapeable shock night
And knew the who and the why;
Wording it how but by him that present and past,
Heaven and earth are word of, worded by?--
The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast
Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light.
30
Jesu, heart's light,
Jesu, maid's son,
What was the feast followed the night
Thou hadst glory of this nun?
Feast of the one woman without stain.
For so conceived, so to conceive thee is done;
But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,
Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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