Favourite Poems 3

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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

God’s Grandeur

Here among long-discarded cassocks,

Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks,

Here where the vicar never looks I nibble through old service books.

Lean and alone I spend my days Behind this Church of England baize.

I share my dark forgotten room With two oil-lamps and half a broom.

The cleaner never bothers me, So here I eat my frugal tea.

My bread is sawdust mixed with straw; My jam is polish for the floor.

Christmas and Easter may be feasts For congregations and for priests,

And so may Whitsun. All the same, They do not fill my meagre frame.

For me the only feast at all

Is Autumn's Harvest Festival, When I can satisfy my want

With ears of corn around the font. I climb the eagle's brazen head

To burrow through a loaf of bread. I scramble up the pulpit stair

And gnaw the marrows hanging there. It is enjoyable to taste

These items ere they go to waste, But how annoying when one finds

That other mice with pagan minds Come into church my food to share

Who have no proper business there. Two field mice who have no desire

To be baptized, invade the choir A large and most unfriendly rat

Comes in to see what we are at. He says he thinks there is no God

And yet he comes ... it's rather odd. This year he stole a sheaf of wheat

(It screened our special preacher's seat), And prosperous mice from fields away

Come in to hear our organ play, And under cover of its notes

Ate through the altar's sheaf of oats. A Low Church mouse, who thinks that I

Am too papistical, and High, Yet somehow doesn't think it wrong

To munch through Harvest Evensong, While I, who starve the whole year through,

Must share my food with rodents who Except at this time of the year

Not once inside the church appear. Within the human world I know

Such goings-on could not be so, For human beings only do

What their religion tells them to. They read the Bible every day

And always, night and morning, pray, And just like me, the good church mouse,

Worship each week in God's own house, But all the same it's strange to me

How very full the church can be With people I don't see at all

Except at Harvest Festival.

John Betjeman

Diary of a Church Mouse

Favourite Poems 3