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.

Carter Revard was a prolific poet and scholar. To learn more about his work, click here.

"What the Eagle Fan Says" was published in How the Songs Came Down (Salt Publishing, 2005).

To learn more about accentual verse, read this brief treatment by poet Dana Gioia.

Margaret Noodin is the author of two bilingual collections of poetry in both Anishinaabemowin and English: Weweni and What the Chickadee Knows. She is a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she also serves as director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education.

To learn more about Ahishinaabemowin, visit ojibwe.net.

To hear the sound of the spring peeper, click on this link.

Photo of Margaret Noodin © Troye Fox.

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.

In this extraordinary curtal sonnet (a shortened sonnet, curtailed), Hopkins packs immense power. He uses the shortened form to heighten the emotion, drawing himself up short in the end with nothing else that can be said other than "Praise him." This week, we walk through these short lines and unfold some of the ways that Hopkins works.

Hopkins was an immensely influential poet of the Victorian era (late 1800s) whose work was not published or encountered until 1918 in the modernist era. He was a reclusive, Jesuit priest who struggled with depression, but who could also be given over to incredible acts of wonder and praise (as in this poem). He stands outside his time, and has been read and loved by poets of all different persuasions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

For more informaiton on Hopkins, please see The Poetry Foundation.

See her poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ejbSCjg2qo

See this great article by Virginia Jackson and Meredith Martin about Amanda Gorman's Inauguration Poem at Avidly:
The Poetry of the Future

For more on Amanda Gorman, see The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amanda-gorman