Gerard Manley Hopkins > Quotes

“
Pied Beauty—
"

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
Oh let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“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.
”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works

“The Windhover

To Christ our Lord


I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. ”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose

“No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

“What I do is me, for that I came.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; _myself_ it speaks and spells,
Crying _What I do is me: for that I came_.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letters to Robert Bridges and Correspondence with Richard Watson Dixon

“NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

“No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Why wouldst thou rude on me they wring-world right foot rock?”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Later Poetic Manuscripts of Gerard Manley Hopkins: From the Wreck of the Deutschland to the Final Dublin Sonnets in Facsimile

“ELECTED Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. To produce is of little use unless what we produce is known, is widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known that it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good. We must try, then, to be known, aim at it, take means to it. And this without puffing in the process or pride in the success.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Letters to Robert Bridges and Correspondence with Richard Watson Dixon

“The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.
(from notes on 'Heraclitean Fire')”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

“No, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

“For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.
Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal…”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring-
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

(From "Spring")”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose

“After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-earth right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poetry

“I bear a basket lined with grass;
I am so light, I am so fair,
That men must wonder as I pass
And at the basket that I bear,
Where in a newly-drawn green litter
Sweet flowers I carry, -- sweets for bitter.

Lilies I shew you, lilies none,
None in Caesar’s gardens blow, --
And a quince in hand, -- not one
Is set, because their buds not spring;
Spring not, ‘cause world is wintering....”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
...
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur and Other Poems

“The Best ideal is the true and other truth is none. All glory be ascribed to the holy Three in One.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“My selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of *I* and *me* above and in all things . . . is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: What must it be to be someone else?).”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring-
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

(from "Spring")”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose

“birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.”
― Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins