selected poetry · hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who died in 1889 almost unpublished, invented sprung rhythm and a compressed, alliterative language to catch what he called inscape, the distinct selfhood of things. The nature poems are shouts of praise; the late 'terrible sonnets' are records of desolation, and both are addressed to a God felt as overwhelmingly present or agonisingly absent.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poetry, edited by Catherine Phillips (Oxford University Press, 2008). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: Winter with the Gulf Stream; Heaven-Haven; The Habit of Perfection; The Wreck of the Deutschland; The Woodlark; God's Grandeur; The Starlight Night; As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; Spring; The Sea and the Skylark; The Windhover; Pied Beauty; Hurrahing in Harvest; The Lantern Out of Doors; Duns Scotus's Oxford; Binsey Poplars; The Candle Indoors; The Bugler's First Communion; Peace; Felix Randal; Spring and Fall; Inversnaid; The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo; I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day; No worst, there is none; To what serves Mortal Beauty?; Carrion Comfort; That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection; Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend.