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Poetry’s Scope and Hope - Five Poems (Part 3)

In his excellent book, Word Made Fresh, Abram Van Engen celebrates the power of poetry, a power that can be edifying and enjoyable in two ways. First, it gives us words to describe things we find difficult, elusive, unclear, or otherwise beyond our verbal reach. Second, in so doing, it opens new vistas of understanding, enlarging the scope of our thinking and our understanding of the world. It helps us to see the world more clearly and thus to engage it more like the stewards and servants God has called us to be.


No poet that I know of does this better than Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). A Jesuit priest, Hopkins served in some very difficult callings. He had a servant’s heart and never complained about the long hours, terrible conditions, unresponsive people, or bouts of ill health. Hopkins turned to poetry to express what he was feeling, whether disappointment and discouragement or exultation and peace. He invented new poetic devices—which he called “sprung rhythm”—to heighten the effects of his verse and aid readers in making their way through his sometimes strange syntax.


Hopkins published no poetry in his lifetime. A friend discovered his verse after he had died and arranged for publication early in the 20th century. Hopkins has been a favorite of poetry-lovers ever sense.


I was first introduced to Hopkins’ poetry, and the power of it, by his well-known sonnet, “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 of 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.


Here Hopkins shows us how to look at the world, in all its complexity, corruption, toil, and tears, with the mind of Christ. The world is a stage on which the grandeur of God can be observed on every hand because He sets it there by being there Himself. We may glimpse God’s grandeur in even the most common things, as a sheet of foil, when light flashes from it; or when oil, liberated from a seed, oozes with fresh new possibilities.


The grandeur of God is everywhere. So why, Hopkins asks, do men not see that grandeur? “Why do men then now not reck his rod” That is, see His hand at work?


Because we’re too distracted by earthly things—work, making a living, diversions, dealing with difficult people. So bound up with world matters are we that we take the God-infused world around us for granted. In the process of our distracted pursuit of the good life, we have put our stamp on the world by paving it over, cutting down its forests, damming its rivers, and leaving so much human waste on Mt. Everest that it’s no longer the kind of place you might like to build a summer home.


But we do not despair, because the Holy Spirit continues to bring new life and beauty and glory out of even the mess we men have made of things (especially in Hopkins’ day: remember that he was writing the same time Dickens was, in a world of rapid industrialization, dirt, waste, and woe).


“Nature”, that is, God’s creation together with the culture of men, is never spent, never worn out to the point at which it cannot be recovered or restored. There is a deep down freshness to all things Hopkins reminds us, and the Holy Spirit broods to bring that out in the works of men, like this poem, for example. Morning always comes again, and with it, the promise that we can be used to restore the reconciled world and turn it rightside-up for Jesus.


I doubt that you or I could find the words to say so much in just the fourteen lines of Hopkins’ sonnet. But poetry helps us put into words what we find difficult to explain, and it brings with it, by its various devices (such as meter and rhyme), an experience of knowing and pleasure which is itself a visitation from the brooding Spirit of God and a foretaste of the world to come. And a poem like “God’s Grandeur” is one you can return to over and over again, when you need some refreshing of your soul to give you words and insight for making a new world.


Today, what will you do to recover some the “dearest freshness deep down things” in the world around you?

 
 
 

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