Poetry: Gerard Manley Hopkins' birthday

(via AnamTuras at Yahoo Groups, this from The Writer's Almanac, July 28)

It's the birthday of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, born in Stratford, England (1844). He was born to a family of High Church Anglicans. He converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest. He preached in the slums of Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Working among poor people, he felt that poetry was too self-indulgent. He burned his early poems, but eventually he grew out of it. He sent his written poems to his friend Robert Bridges, who published them after Hopkins's death.

Gerard Manley Hopkins spent the end of his years in Dublin as a professor of Greek and Latin, teaching classical languages to students who didn't care for them, and he hated his work. He hated grading papers since so many of his students had failed their exams, but he tried to fight off his depression, and his last words before he died were, "I am happy, so happy."
---
"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things?  
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;  
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;  
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;  
  Landscape plotted and pieced?fold, fallow, and plough;
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.  
  
All things counter, original, spare, strange;  
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)  
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;  
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                  Praise him.
---
"God's Grandeur" by 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.