A poetry moment.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is the poet I turn to most often. I don't read a whole lot of poetry — I find it rich and demanding, and prefer to keep it for occasional consumption rather than a steady diet — but lately my appetite for it has been growing, and I've rediscovered Hopkins for about the fifth or sixth time in my life. (I went to a Jesuit university; there was no escaping Hopkins, himself a Jesuit.)

One of the things that draws me to him is his passion for finding and celebrating the deeper, larger, more real existences that lie beyond the things we see and touch. For Hopkins, the world was full of adventure, meaning, crucial importance, cosmic good and evil: embodied as much within a small wildflower as within the great armed conflicts of human history, as much in the daily business of life as in stories of heroes, demons, and angels. While he wrote from a Christian viewpoint, I don't think you need to share that viewpoint to understand, and even agree with, what he was on about.

Think you're only what you appear to be? Think you're ordinary? Gerard Manley Hopkins begs to differ.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.