The Catholic Writers Guild

We are exposed to SOOOO much media in every way shape and form these days.  We spend a lot of time trying to figure out the good, the bad and the indifferent.  We forget that as a culture, there was a time when most of the stuff we would see in print was smartly crafted, well done and worth reading, otherwise it wouldn’t be printed.  This was especially true of Catholic teaching and poetry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries  when we enjoyed the onslaught from Oxford.  The English, surprisingly enough gave us the  era of C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton.  Preparing their way, however, was a convert to the faith who became a Jesuit, no less, and had an elegant way with the teachings of the Church.  This was, of course, Gerard Manly Hopkins, enjoy!

 

Sketch of Gothic window by Gerard Manley Hopkins

God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with the warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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. 

“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, willful-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, eyes, heart, 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.

                                             ~Gerard Manley Hopkins 

At The Wedding March

God with honour hang your head,
Groom, and grace you, bride, your bed
With lissome scions, sweet scions,
Out of hallowed bodies bred.
Each be other’s comfort kind:
Deep, deeper than divined,
Divine charity, dear charity,
Fast you ever, fast bind.
Then let the March tread our ears:
I to him turn with tears
Who to wedlock, his wonder wedlock,
Deals triumph and immortal years.

**Many thanks to Bernadette Waterman Ward who reminded us of the elegance of Hopkins in her presentation at the CWG conference in August.

Next Month the change in the seasons as well as the length of day become obvious.  Do you have a poem that address “The Light”,  “The Dark” or Changes in the way we see things?

Good Writing, KC