Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

All Poems Original Poems Translations

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In Honour Of St Alphonsus Rodriguez

Laybrother of the Society of Jesus

Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;

And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield

Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,

And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.

On Christ they do and on the martyr may;

But be the war within, the brand we wield

Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

For a Picture of St Dorothea

I bear a basket lined with grass;

I am so light, I am so fair,

That men must wonder as I pass

And at the basket that I bear,

Where in a newly-drawn green litter

Sweet flowers I carry,—sweets for bitter.

Lilies I shew you, lilies none,

None in Caesar’s gardens blow,—

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Child Is Father to the Man

'The child is father to the man.'

How can he be? The words are wild.

Suck any sense from that who can:

'The child is father to the man.'

No; what the poet did write ran,

'The man is father to the child.'

'The child is father to the man!'

How can he be? The words are wild.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ash-Boughs

Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,

Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep

Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.

Say it is ashboughs: whether on a December day and furled

Fast ór they in clammyish lashtender combs creep

Apart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high.

They touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Wreck Of The Deutschland

to the happy memory of five Francisan nuns, exiles by the Falck Laws,

drowned between midnight |&| morning of December 1875

PART THE FIRST

Thou mastering me

God! giver of breath and bread;

World's strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of living |&| dead;

Thou hast bound bones |&| veins in me, fastened me flesh,

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Harry Ploughman

Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue

Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank

Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank—

Head and foot, shoulder and shank—

By a grey eye’s heed steered well, one crew, fall to;

Stand at stress. Each limb’s barrowy brawn, his thew

That onewhere curded, onewhere sucked or sank—

Soared or sank—,

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

May Magnificat

May is Mary's month, and I

Muse at that and wonder why:

Her feasts follow reason,

Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day;

But the Lady Month, May,

Why fasten that upon her,

With a feasting in her honour?

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

(The Soldier)

Yes. Why do we áll, seeing of a soldier, bless him? bless

Our redcoats, our tars? Both these being, the greater part,

But frail clay, nay but foul clay. Here it is: the heart,

Since, proud, it calls the calling manly, gives a guess

That, hopes that, makesbelieve, the men must be no less;

It fancies, feigns, deems, dears the artist after his art;

And fain will find as sterling all as all is smart,

And scarlet wear the spirit of wár thére express.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Denis

Denis, whose motionable, alert, most vaulting wit

Caps occasion with an intellectual fit.

Yet Arthur is a Bowman: his three-heeled timber ’ll hit

The bald and bóld blínking gold when áll ’s dóne

Right rooting in the bare butt’s wincing navel in the sight of the sun.

. . . . . . . .

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

In The Valley Of The Elwy

I remember a house where all were good

To me, God knows, deserving no such thing:

Comforting smell breathed at very entering,

Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood.

That cordial air made those kind people a hood

All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wing

Will, or mild nights the new morsels of spring:

Why, it seemed of course; seemed of right it should.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Epithalamion

Hark, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe

We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood

Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,

Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,

That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown

Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between

Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.

We are there, when we hear a shout

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Moonrise

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:

The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,

Or paring of paradisaical fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,

Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;

A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quite utterly.

This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,

Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins