Did you know that the Nobel Foundation allows people to reprint Nobel lectures for free? Hah, take that, way-overpriced Harvard University Press. But enough of this permissions chatter. It's the first day of spring, the forecast claims that it will be 78 degrees in Harmony, and I'll be hanging laundry on the line and listening to pileated woodpeckers shout romantically among the tameracks. What could be better?

God's Grandeur


Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.