Hurrahing in Harvest

A poet whom I really like is Gerard Manley Hopkins. I think the second, third and fourth lines in this poem are the loveliest lines in English poetry. On a windy Wellington day I’ve seen cloud racing off the hills in exactly the fashion Hopkins so beautifully describes. Sound and sense so perfectly combined. He was a Jesuit priest as this poem shows. The yanking together the idea of God as a stallion and a violet is breath-taking. And I admire the honesty of the last line, the admission of doubt. Enjoy!

Hurrahing in Harvest

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic - as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! -
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins