Gerard Manley Hopkins: Quotes about beauty

“Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo: The Golden Echo, line 19
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

God , Beauty

“I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Journal (19 July 1872)
Letters, etc

People , Beauty

“Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Spring http://www.bartleby.com/122/9.html", stanza 1
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Context: Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.

Love , Beauty , Spring

“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.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins Pied Beauty

"Pied Beauty", lines 7-11
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Beauty , Change , Past

“Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

" Hurrahing in Harvest http://www.bartleby.com/122/14.html", lines 1-4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Love , Beauty , Summer

“O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Binsey Poplars", stanza 2
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)