Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins | Page 9

tears sad truelove
should.
28
But to Christ lord of thunder
Crouch; lay knee by earth low
under:
'Holiest, loveliest, bravest,
Save my hero, O Hero savest.
29
And the prayer thou hearst me making
Have, at the awful
overtaking,
Heard; have heard and granted
Grace that day grace was wanted.'
30
Not that hell knows redeeming,
But for souls sunk in seeming
Fresh, till doomfire burn all,
Prayer shall fetch pity eternal.
_18
The May Magnificat_
MAY is Mary's month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:

Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season--
Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?
Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?
Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?--
Growth in every thing--
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and green world all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.
All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature's motherhood.
Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.
Well but there was more than this:
Spring's universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the
orchard-apple

And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry
And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet
like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all--
This ecstacy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till
Christ's birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.
_19
Binsey Poplars
felled 1879_
MY aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in
leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and
wind-wandering weed-winding
bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew--
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like
this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where
we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers

cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial
rural scene.
_20
Duns Scotus's Oxford_
TOWERY city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing,
bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rookracked,
river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and
town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;
Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature
thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast
confounded
Rural rural keeping--folk, flocks, and flowers.
Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and
waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways
my spirits to peace;
Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival
Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot.
_21
Henry Purcell_
_The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell
and praises him
that, whereas other musicians have given
utterance to the moods of
man's mind, he has, beyond
that, uttered in notes the very make and
species of man as
created both in him and in all men generally._

HAVE fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
To me, so
arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell, An age is now since
passed, since parted; with the reversal Of the outward sentence low lays
him, listed to a heresy,
here.
Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,
Or love or
pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle: It is the forgèd feature
finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on,
so throngs
the ear.
Let him Oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me!
only I'll
Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to
his pelted plumage under
Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever
he has walked
his while
The thunder-purple seabeach plumè purple-of-thunder,
If a wuthering
of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a
colossal smile
Off him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with
wonder.
_22
Peace_
WHEN will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your
round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peacè,
will you, Peace? I'll not play
hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but


That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace
allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the