Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins | Page 5

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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Well, she has thee for the pain, for the?Patience; but pity of the rest of them!?Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the
Comfortless unconfessed of them--?No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence?Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and?Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest; does
tempest carry the grain for thee?
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I admire thce, master of the tides,?Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall;?The recurb and the recovery of the gulfs sides,
The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall; Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;?Ground of being, and granite of it: past all?Grasp God, throned behind?Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides;
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With a mercy that outrides?The all of water, an ark?For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides
Lower than death and the dark;?A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison, The-last-breath penitent spirits--the uttermost mark?Our passion-plungèd giant risen,?The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of
his strides.
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Now burn,