Gerard Manley Hopkins

Towery city and branching between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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 so 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.

— 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 lightning to hear him sing.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left. O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Up above, what wind walks! What lovely behavior of silk-sack clouds has wilder, wilful, wavier, meal-drift molded over and melted across skies!

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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 changed: Praise Him.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shook foil. It gathers to greatness like ooze of oil. Crushed.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

And for all this, nature is never spent. There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. And though the last nights 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 Ah! bright wings.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

The boughs, the boughs are bare enough But earth has never felt the snow. Frost-furred our ivies are and rough With bills of rime the brambles shew The hoarse leaves crawl on hissing ground Because the sighing wind is low.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins