The dappled dieaway cheek and the wimpled lip, The goldwisp, the airy grey eye, all in fellowship This, all this beauty blooming, This, all this freshness fuming, Give God while worth consuming. Both thought and thew now bolder And told by Nature: Tower; Head, heart, hand, heel, and shoulder That beat and breathe in power This pride of prime's enjoyment Take as for tool, not toy meant And hold at Christ's employment. The vault and scope and schooling And mastery in the mind, In silk-ash kept from cooling And ripest under rind What life half lifts the latch of What hell stalks toward the snatch of Your offering, with dispatch of.
Four Sacred Songs
Song Cycle by John Mitchell (b. 1941)
1. A Daily Offering
Language: English
Text Authorship:
- by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)
Go to the general single-text view
Researcher for this page: Victoria Brago2. Pied Beauty
Language: English
Glory be to God for dappled things -- For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and trim. And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 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
3. Thee God, I come from
Language: English
Thee, God, I come from, to thee go, All day long I like fountain flow From thy hand out, swayed about Motelike in thy mighty glow. What I know of thee I bless, As acknowledging thy stress On my being and as seeing Something of thy holiness. Once I turned from thee and hid, Bound on what thou hadst forbid; Sow the wind I would; I sinned; I repent of what I did. Bad I am, but yet thy child. Father, be thou reconciled, Spare thou me, since I see With thy might that thou art mild. I have life before me still And thy purpose to fulfill; Yea a debt to pay thee yet: Help me, sir, and so I will. But thou bidst, and just thou art, Me shew mercy from my heart Towards my brother, every other Man my mate and counterpart.
Text Authorship:
- by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889), appears in Lyra Sacra: A Book of Religious Verse, first published 1895
See other settings of this text.
Researcher for this page: Victoria Brago4. The windhover
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
Total word count: 463