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Poem in Your Pocket Day

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Today is National Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day, which means you carry around your favorite poem all day and inflict it upon everyone you meet. Which is what I intend to do here.

I had a hard time choosing. Something modern and obscure? Something famous that everyone was forced to read and hated in school? Something funny and accessible? I don't have a single favorite.

I chose this, just because I love it so much. And because it was Earth Day last week. And because it's Spring. And because Hopkins really is my favorite poet. I love the sounds. I love the images. It knocks me off my feet.

God's Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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 Hold Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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