God's Grandeur

This is a gorgeous poem that I feel just radiates beauty and truth with literary clarity. I encourage you to read through it more than once and read it out loud at least once. I just heard it at our Fall Faculty Retreat and it captured me.

God's Grandeur

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 bring eastward, springs --

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breat and with ah! bright wings.