God's Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins · written 1877; published 1918

Catalog grade guidance: 9–12

14 content lines · 125 words · Est. recitation about 1 min 8 sec (approx.)

Public-domain text for reading and recitation practice. 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).Estimated time uses ~120 words/minute plus short pauses—not a contest rule.

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.