Nature's Freshness

Dove in Nest

I was excited to notice a pair of doves building a nest right outside my bedroom window.  Unfortunately they didn't share my excitement at being so close to me, as I was constantly opening the curtain to peer at them, positioning the camera to take pictures.  They have now moved to quieter lodgings.

"There lives the dearest freshness deep down things," writes Gerard Manley Hopkins in "God's Grandeur."  But sometimes this freshness requires being undisturbed.  How much longer will we be able to say, with Hopkins, that "nature is never spent"?

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.