May is Mary’s month, and I |
Muse at that and wonder why : |
Her feasts follow reason, |
Dated due to season—
|
Candlemas, Lady Day ; |
But the Lady Month, May, |
Why fasten that upon her, |
With a feasting in her honour ?
|
Is it only its being brighter |
Than the most are must delight her ? |
Is it opportunist |
And flowers finds soonest ?
|
Ask of her, the mighty mother : |
Her reply puts this other |
Question : What is Spring?— |
Growth in every thing—
|
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, |
Grass and greenworld all together ; |
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted |
Throstle above her nested
|
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin |
Forms and warms the life within ; |
And bird and blossom swell |
In sod or sheath or shell.
|
All things rising, all things sizing |
Mary sees, sympathizing |
With that world of good |
Nature’s motherhood.
|
Their magnifying of each its kind |
With delight calls to mind |
How she did in her stored |
Magnify the Lord.
|
Well but there was more than this : |
Spring’s universal bliss |
Much, had much to say |
To offering Mary May.
|
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple |
Bloom lights the orchard-apple |
And thicket and thorp are merry |
With silver-surfèd cherry
|
And azuring-over greybell makes |
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like
lakes |
And magic cuckoocall |
Caps, clears, and clinches all—
|
This ecstasy all through mothering
earth |
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s
birth |
To remember and exultation |
In God who was her salvation.
|
Gerard
Manley Hopkins |
Classic Poems |
|
[ The Sea and the Skylark ] [ Windhover ] [ Spring ] [ Hurrahing in Harvest ] [ God's Grandeur ] [ The Wreck of the Deutschland ] [ The Caged Skylark ] [ Moonrise ] [ Inversnaid ] [ Pied Beauty ] [ as kingfishers catch fire ] [ In The Valley of the Elwy ] [ The May Magnificat ] |