Dear Friends (and others),
Happy Easter.
Winter was long and brutal this year. Now spring is nigh. The snowdrops are behind us. Everywhere, the purple-lavender crowns of crocuses announce the season. Clumps of forsythia are beginning their yellow triumph by the roadside while daffodils have begun to trumpet springtime. Other buds and shoots are crowding in the wings. In just a week or two, the flowering cherries and pears will be bursting with blossoms. The apple tree outside my study window has bedecked itself with thousands of tightly wrought green promises just waiting to blossom into a glory of white and pink. In short, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in “God’s Grandeur,” one of his most magnificent poems, although “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” although “the soil is bare now,” yet “for all this nature is never spent.”
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
I have loved Hopkins’s poem since I first read it in high school—the incantatory diction, the haunting music, and the emotion compressed, distilled, and stripped bare in language that trembles to contain all it seeks to impart (“there lives the dearest freshness deep down things”).
Join the conversation as a VIP Member