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.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS believed we can infer the existence of God from the appearance of a beautiful flower. He wrote some of his finest, intricate poems in Ireland, though his work was virtually unknown during his lifetime. He was born in Stratford in 1844 and died in Dublin, of typhoid fever, in 1889.