The Washington Post, January 20th, 2002
Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet "God's Grandeur" is one of the poems that many readers, including poets, have been reciting with special intensity since Sept. 11. Hopkins wrote the poem in 1877, the year of his ordination to the priesthood, and it is filled with his sacramental impulse to praise the natural world, to affirm its intrinsic pattern and beauty. Mankind may have defaced and blackened the human realm, Hopkins argues, but an eternal freshness, an electric majesty, animates nature itself. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; I...
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