poetry in troubled times

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.

Gerard Manly Hopkins, died in 1899, a Jesuit priest not regarded highly as a poet in his time, but rediscovered in the 30's because of his unique way with words.  Which is what drew him to me because I am not a religious man.

If Beagles remembers in sophomore English Mrs Stark made us remember so many lines of Shakespeare.  I didn't care much for that because of the mindless roteness of it. and I cared even less when in my sophomore year in college I was required to memorize so many lines of poetry, Yeats, Eliot, some other guys.  Kind of appreciate it now because I still know many of those lines while so much other stuff has just slipped away.

The Hopkins stuff, I know a couple other poems, I learned on my own.  As I've said the religious stuff has no impact on me but I just love the flow of the words.  I do not sing in the shower but I do sometimes recite poetry.  I can go through that particular poem three times and it will take me from stepping into the stream to toweling off as I step out.


I was a Warren guy in the primary.  I went so far as to go to one of her offices located conveniently across the street from the Ten Cat and give her some money to get a button and they also showered me with pages of propaganda which I was supposed to propagate which ended up being swept right into the trash can a couple days later when she withdrew her candidacy,

That left Biden and Bernie, and I liked Bernie better, but I thought Biden had a better chance of winning and that seemed more important so I went with him.

I got involved in some short fb discussions on the subject.  My main point to the Bernie guys was look you can fight this out in the primaries as much as you want, for that is the way of democracy, but don't go so far out that when this is over you can't join the other dems to defeat the much greater evil.

But the harder core of the Bernie people saw it as a battle between good and evil, and in that case there was no place for compromise.  Of course I am a big fan of compromise.  "I had rather be right than president," Henry Clay declared in 1839, and I submit that dumber words were seldom spoken.  It is always better to be president than to be right.

You know there has always been this conflict between those who want to set things right for once and for all and those who just want to muddle through with the least damage and I am in the camp of the latter.

One of my arguments is that the battle for good and evil has gone on forever and in all this time good has never won out for once and all, so very likely it never will, so let's just win one battle at a time.

Kind of depressing to think that good can never win out completely.  But remember the poem, I was reciting it in the shower, specifically those lines about the holy ghost above the bent world brooding with ah, bright wings, which are maybe my favorite lines and it occurred to me that those bright wings were making their appearance after all that smearing and smudging of trade and toil, so here is a defeat for evil.  In all of the long battle between good and evil, evil has never won out for once and all.

Which is good news, but it leads one to wonder why evil which seems so dark and dauntless in the present time has never been able to defeat good.

This will be expounded on later.  I bought ten new tomato plants yesterday and I want to get out on the balcony and wish them a hearty good morning.