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 » Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build--but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.