[lit-ideas] The Other Side Of Hopkins
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2009 23:03:08 -0600
IL MYSTICO
Hence sensual gross desires,
Right offspring of your grimy mother Earth!
My Spirit had a birth
Alien from yours as heaven from Nadir-fires:
You rank and reeking things,
Scoop you from teeming fields some sickly hovel,
And there for ever grovel
"Mid fever'd fumes and slime and cacked clot:
But foul and cumber not
The shaken plumage of my Spirit's wings.
[etc.]
--- Gerard Manley Hopkins
an unfinished poem written between 8 and 17 before
"Hurrahing In Harvest"
Ah, yes, this is the mind-set I was raised in. The physical world is an evil
that pulls us away from adoration of God and the quest for spiritual
perfection. Our souls are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord. Things
changed for me. I think they changed for Gerard as well -- certainly not as
radically as they did for me. He began to see that the physical world as a
mirror of the grandeur of God. I began to see it as God.
Mike Geary
Memphis
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