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.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English poet and Jesuit priest, 1877