Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins | Page 5

wreck.
Night roared, with the heart-break
hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman's wailing, the crying of child
without check-- Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,
A
prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.
18
Ah, touched in your bower of bone
Are you! turned for an exquisite
smart,
Have you! make words break from me here all alone,
Do you!--mother of being in me, heart.
O unteachably after evil, but
uttering truth,
Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start!
Never-eldering revel and river of youth,
What can it be, this glee? the
good you have there of your own?
19
Sister, a sister calling
A master, her master and mine!--
And the
inboard seas run swirling and bawling;
The rash smart sloggering brine
Blinds her; but she that weather sees
one thing, one;
Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine
Ears,
and the call of the tall nun
To the men in the tops and the tackle rode
over the storm's brawling.
20
She was first of a five and came
Of a coifèd sisterhood.
(O
Deutschland, double a desperate name!
O world wide of its good!
But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a
town,
Christ's lily and beast of the waste wood:
From life's dawn it
is drawn down,
Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked
the same.)

21
Loathed for a love men knew in them,
Banned by the land of their
birth,
Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;
Surf, snow, river and earth
Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion
of light;
Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,
Thou martyr-master: in thy sight
Storm flakes were scroll-leaved
flowers, lily showers--sweet
heaven was astrew in them.
22
Five! the finding and sake
And cipher of suffering Christ.
Mark, the
mark is of man's make
And the word of it Sacrificed.
But he scores it in scarlet himself on
his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced--

Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token
For lettering of the lamb's fleece,
ruddying of the rose-flake.
23
Joy fall to thee, father Francis,
Drawn to the Life that died;
With
the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his
Lovescape crucified
And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy
daughters
And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,
Are sisterly
sealed in wild waters,
To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in
his all-fire glances.
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 endragonèd 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.
31
Well, she has thee for the pain, for the
Patience; but pity of the rest of
them!
Heart,