A poem by Gerard Mandley Hopkins that speaks of the grandeur of God in and behind everything we experience in this world… and yet fail to see and appreciate… even worse we ‘smear’ all over it. But it is still there! In a few places I’ve added my own thought of what the words mean.
“The world is charged (energized) with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil (shaking tin foil in sunlight);
It gathers (spreads) to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck (recognize) his rod (sceptre, rule)?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod (walked all over);
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare (empty) now, nor can foot feel, being shod (our shoes keep us from feeling).
And for all this, nature is never spent (never loses its God worth);
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things (buried, hidden within);
And though the last lights off the black West went (sunset, everything going dark)
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward (sunrise), springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods (hovers, flutters, like a bird, Genesis 1:2) with warm breast
And with ah! bright wings.”
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)