My dear friend Greg Camacho from San Antonio, Texas, wrote yesterday morning quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the poem “Inversnaid”: What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
WE PAVED PARADISE
This world then is word, expression, news of God. —Gerard Manley Hopkins May 3, 1866 Ashes are out, only tufted with their fringy blooms. Hedges springing richly. Elms in small leaf, with more or less opacity. White poplars most beautiful in small grey crisp spray-like leaf. Cowslips capriciously colouring meadows in creamy drifts. Bluebells, purple […]
ON HEARING THAT A FRIEND’S 13-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER HAD BEEN RAPED
Jan. 4, 1869 We have had wind and rain, so that floods are out, but in temperature the weather mild to an unusual degree.–The other evening after a very bright day,the air rinsed quite clear, there was a shalsh of glowing yolk-coloured sunset.–On the 1st frost day (which otherwise I do not remember for a […]
SEND MY ROOTS RAIN
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was an English convert to Roman Catholicism and a Jesuit priest who wrote some of the most complex, astonishing, and wrenching poetry of the modern age. In 1886, an Irish poet named Kathleen Tynan asked how it was that “a man like him with all his interest in art and literature […]