Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins | Page 7

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent
floating forth at a farmyard scare!--
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is
a prize.
Buy then! bid then!--What?--Prayer, patience, alms,
vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow
sallows!
These
are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright
paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
_9
Spring_
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.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.
Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind

and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the
winning.
_10
The Lantern out of Doors_
SOMETIMES a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and
bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading
light?
Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our
much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys
them quite.
Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight
is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ's interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot
fóllows kínd,
Their
ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.
_11
The Sea and the Skylark_
ON ear and ear two noises too old to end
Trench--right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
With a flood or a
fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear
and wend.
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,

His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild
winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none's to spill nor spend.
How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
How ring right out our sordid turbid time,
Being pure! We, life's
pride and cared-for crown,
Have lost that cheer and charm of earth's past prime:
Our make and
making break, are breaking, down
To man's last dust, drain fast towards man's first slime.
_12
The Windhover:
To Christ our Lord_
I CAUGHT this morning morning's minion, kingdom
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 ecstacy! 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.
_13
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 àll tràdes, 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.
_14
Hurrahing in Harvest_
SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the
stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely

behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift
moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our
Saviour;
And, éyes,
heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love's greeting
of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding
shoulder
Majestic--as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!--
These
things, these things were here and but the
beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears
wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off
under his feet.
_15
Caged Skylark_
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house,
dwells--
That
bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery,
day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop
deadly sometimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts