Gerard Hopkins Quotations

What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left. O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Where no storms come, / Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, / And out of the swing of the sea.

I have desired to go / Where springs not fail, / To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail / And a few lilies blow,

Glory be to God for dappled things for skies of couple-color as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim

Just for lack / Of answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack / There God to aggrandize, God to glorify.

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!/ O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! / The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend / With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. / Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must / Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Birds build - but not I build; no, but strain,/ Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. / Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

I see / The lost are like this, and their scourge to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

O then if in my lagging lines you miss / The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne'er hung there.

A few other little things; some in sprung rhythm, with various other experiments.

O if we but knew what we do when we delve or hew -- hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender to touch, her being so slender, that like this sleek and seeing ball but a prick will make no eye at all, where we, even where we mean to mend her we end her, when we hew or delve: after-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse / Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things . . . ,

I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon.

All Life death does end and each day dies with sleep

And my lament / Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.