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Hopkins Set

Song Cycle by Newel Kay Brown (b. 1932)

?. 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]

?. 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]

?. The windhover  [sung text not yet checked]

Language: English 
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin,
  dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding of the rolling level
  underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bowbend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle!  AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermillion.

Text Authorship:

  • by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889), "The windhover", 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) , "Tuulihaukka: Omistettu Herrallemme Kristukselle", copyright © 2011, (re)printed on this website with kind permission

Researcher for this page: Victoria Brago
Total word count: 336
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This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
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