The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

• As Kingfishers Catch Fire
• Binsey Poplars
• The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe
• Carrion Comfort
• Duns Scotus' Oxford
• God's Grandeur
• Harry Ploughman
• Henry Purcell
• Hurrahing in Harvest
• Inversnaid
• I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark
• The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
• The May Magnificat
• My Own Heart, Let Me Have More Pity On
• No Worst, There is None
• Patience, Hard Thing!
• Pied Beauty
• The Sea and the Skylark
• Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves
• Spring
• Spring and Fall
• St. Alphonsus Rodriguez
• The Starlight Night
• That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection
• Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord
• Tom's Garland
• To Seem the Stranger
• To What Serves Mortal Beauty
• The Windhover
• The Wreck of the Deutschland - Part the First
• The Wreck of the Deutschland - Part the Second

The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins » Carrion Comfort

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist--slack they may be--these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against
me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to
avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer
and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy,
would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling
flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each
one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my
God!) my God.