Source: Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918), as in the library text of Hopkins's Poems (Project Gutenberg #22403)
Source URL: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22403
Public domain basis: Written 1877; first published 1918 by Robert Bridges; public domain in the United States.
Coverage: Complete: the sonnet; three lines that the source edition wraps for width are rejoined.


# God's Grandeur

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 warm breast and with ah! bright wings.