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Manley Hopkins, Gerald - The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
Identifier
001813
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Too many symbols to list them all, I have listed some of the main onesA description of the experience
Gerard Manley Hopkins – from The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
How to keep – is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, …. from vanishing away?
…
There is one, yes I have one (hush there).
….
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! One,
One. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matched-face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth; it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace –
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sight soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the leash lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept – where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where –
Yonder – What high as that! We follow, now we follow –
Yonder, yes, yonder, yonder, yonder,
Yonder