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Sacred Songs for Pantheists

Song Cycle by Robert Eugene Ward (1917 - 2013)

1. Pied Beauty  [sung text not yet checked]

Language: English 
Glory be to God for dappled things --
  For skies of couple-colour as a [brinded]1 cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and [plough]2. 
    [And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.]3

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
        Praise him.

Text Authorship:

  • by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889), "Pied Beauty", written 1877, appears in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, first published 1918

See other settings of this text.

Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):

  • FIN Finnish (Suomi) (Erkki Pullinen) , "Monimuotoista kauneutta", copyright © 2011, (re)printed on this website with kind permission

View original text (without footnotes)
1 sometimes modernized to "brindled"
2 Mitchell: "trim"
2 omitted by Mitchell

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

2. Little things  [sung text not yet checked]

Language: English 
Little things that run and quail
And die in silence and despair;

Little things that fight and fail
And fall on earth and sea and air;

All trapped and frightened little things,
The mouse, the coney, hear our prayer.

As we forgive those done to us,
The lamb, the linnet, and the hare,

Forgive us all our trespasses,
Little creatures everywhere.

Text Authorship:

  • by James Stephens (1882 - 1950), "Little things", appears in Little Things, first published 1924

See other settings of this text.

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

3. Intoxication  [sung text not yet checked]

Language: English 
I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!

Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!

Text Authorship:

  • by Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886), no title, appears in Poems of Emily Dickinson, first published 1890

See other settings of this text.

Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):

  • FRE French (Français) (Guy Laffaille) , copyright © 2016, (re)printed on this website with kind permission
  • GER German (Deutsch) (Bertram Kottmann) , copyright © 2016, (re)printed on this website with kind permission

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

4. Heaven‑Haven  [sung text not yet checked]

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

    And I have asked to be
        Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
     And out of the swing of the sea.

Text Authorship:

  • by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889), "Heaven-Haven", subtitle: "A nun takes the veil", appears in Lyra Sacra: A Book of Religious Verse, first published 1895

See other settings of this text.

Available translations, adaptations or excerpts, and transliterations (if applicable):

  • GER German (Deutsch) [singable] (Bertram Kottmann) , subtitle: "Sie geht ins Kloster", copyright © 2018, (re)printed on this website with kind permission

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

5. God's Grandeur  [sung text not yet checked]

Language: English 
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil 
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? 
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; 
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil 
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went 
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -- 
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent   
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Text Authorship:

  • by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889), "God's Grandeur", appears in Lyra Sacra: A Book of Religious Verse, first published 1895

See other settings of this text.

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]
Total word count: 398
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