As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes its self; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
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.
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 all trades, 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.
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows $$ flaunt forth, then
chevy on an airbuilt
thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs, $$ they
throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, $$ wherever an
elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long $$ lashes lace, lance,
and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous $$ ropes, wrestles, beats
earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; $$ in pool and rutpeel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed $$ dough, crust, dust; stanches,
starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks $$ treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, $$ nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest $$ to her, her clearest-selvèd
spark
Man, how fast his firedint,$$ his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig $$ nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, $$ death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time $$ beats level. Enough! the
Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, $$ joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. $$ Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd,$$ patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.