Grandeur. Spring.

Today, T. Thorn Coyle quotes Martha Graham:

There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.

and reminds me of one of my favorite spring poems EVER that I've been meaning to post:

Gerard Manley Hopkins 1918.

7. 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.

I've caged Hopkins' final lines more times than I can count when invoking Air/the Guardians of the Watchtower of the East to cast a circle. (Or course, more recently, I've stolen directly from Robert Louis Stevenson: "I watched you toss the kites on high, and blow the birds about the sky. I felt you pass. I heard you call. I could not see yourself at all, Oh, Wind, a-blowing, all day long, Oh, Wind, that sings so loud a song." It's easy to call East.)

But I love everything about this poem. This poem alone can bring me back to myself, can help me to remember who I really am and where I really live when life seems ugly, threatening, frightening, sad.

I love Hopkins' notion that the experience of deity is like the sparks of light that come off of shook foil and that gathers to greatness like an ooze of oil that is crushed beneath a weight. But, as he notes, the soil is bare now and feet, shod inside shoes, cannot feel it. (See a few weeks ago my post re: the joys of going barefoot.)

And, then, the key lines: And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. There lives the dearest freshness deep down inside everything, inside a seed, inside a rock, inside a tree, inside the birdsong filling the air, inside the blackberry bushes fencing in the field, inside you, inside me, inside each cell, inside cancer, inside bacteria, inside the soil, inside the bulbs, inside the Sun, inside the Atlantic, inside, well, inside everything.

And, then, Hopkins' paen to Sophia: "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."

For me, the grandeur of the world is wrapped up in photosynthesis, in sun on leaves, in ideas that whiz around the noosphere so fast that no able-fingered adept could ever really play this glass bead game.

Long may she so brood. Don't give up on us, Sophia. There is, indeed, the dearest freshness deep down things.