AH BRIGHT WINGS IN JULY

REPEAT AFTER HOPKINS: NATURE IS NEVER SPENT.

This is one of my favorite sonnets and written by the extraordinary Jesuit poet, GM Hopkins. I love his poems and his word play.  He stretched meaning  and sounds.  I love his playfulness and his profundity.

This sonnet especially handles the turn that should  occur in every sonnet. He uses his eight lines  of opening to present the problems that  man has  brought to his  world and to God's Creation.
Then  he reassures us that all is well."And for all this Nature is never spent."

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. That last image is a closer and magnificent.  The Holy Ghost brooding over the created world like a mother hen brooding over her chicks.  He has in that  last  line summed up the  consequences of the INCARNATION. God  took on  a human form and that was Jesus, and once that happened it can never be reversed.  God taking on material form infused all matter with the brightness of DIVINITY and it will never dim. We participate in the INCARNATION and we are dazzling right now with the Divine. Another poet born and raised in PAwtucket and  whom  I love expressed this in another way-- Saint Francis and the Sow BY GALWAY KINNELL The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;    though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;    as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch    blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow    began remembering all down her thick length,    from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,    from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine    down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering    from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.