What We Mourn

Spring and Fall
to a young child
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

As Should We All

Pied Beauty

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 plough;
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.

To whomever of whatever one gives thanks and praise, be it the earth, random chemistry, or a named or unnamed deity, dappled things merit gratitude. Hey, we're not perfect.

The Japanese (I remark upon this from time to time, hoping to attract the word back to my brain) have a phrase for that which is beautiful precisely because it is transient. All that talk about butterflies and autumn leaves. Of course, I'm inviting a Jesuit -- Gerard Manley Hopkins -- to expand and expound upon this theme.

Hopkins, of course, gave his thanks to a Catholic God --

God’s Grandeur

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.

-- but that does not mean that those who are not Christians should dismiss him. Like Ackerman and Eiseley, both scientists, like Andy Goldsworthy, like children as yet unschooled to sophistication (not yet taught that patterns of shade on grass hold less beauty than mosiacs, bias-cut fabric or a carefully composed painting), Hopkins saw wonder in the mundane --

Repeat that, repeat

Repeat that, repeat,
Cuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart-springs, delightfully sweet,
With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound
Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground, hollow hollow hollow ground:
The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound.

-- as should we all.