Tag Archives: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Barbarous in Beauty, What Wind-Walks!

By Robin Bates | Published: November 15, 2025

In “Hurrahing the Harvest” Hopkins has an intensive experience with autumn that he equates with an interaction with God.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "God's Grandeur", "Windhover", “Hurrahing the Harvest", mystical experience, Nature, Spring and Fall | Comments closed

For Mother’s Day, a Pregnant Mary

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2025

Hopkins’s “May Magnificat” associated pregnant Mary with spring bursting out all over.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Cherry Tree Carol", "May Magnificat", "Spring", "Sumer is ycomen in", Mary, pregnancy | Comments closed

Atkinson Uses Lit to Explore Dying

By Robin Bates | Published: December 23, 2024

Atkinson, in “A God in Ruins,” uses literary fragments to explore the process of dying. She includes excerpts from Shakespeare, Blake, Hopkins, Wordsworth and others.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Adlestrop", "God's Grandeur", "Holly and the Ivy", "Lamb", "Ministry of Angels", "On First Reading Chapman's Homer", death and dying, Edmund Spenser, Edmund Thomas, John Keats, Kate Atkinson, Love in Ruins, Midsummer Night's Dream, Spring and Fall, Tempest, William Blake, William Shakespeare | Comments closed

Lose Yourself Inside This Soft World

By Robin Bates | Published: June 15, 2024

Be mindful of the world, Mary Oliver tells us in “Mindful,” a poem that echoes Wordsworth and Hopkins.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Mindful", "Tables Turned", God's created world, Mary Oliver, Spring and Fall, William Wordsworth | Comments closed

The Transfiguration’s Green Promise

By Robin Bates | Published: February 10, 2024

Christian environmental scholar Gatta believes the Transfiguration story offers a religious paradigm for environmentalists.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged " Transfiguration, "World Is Charged", John Gatta, Teilhard de Chardin | Comments closed

St. Francis: Made for Beauty

By Robin Bates | Published: October 7, 2023

St. Francis radically changed the way we see beauty and ourselves in relationship to beauty.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "As Kingfishers Catch Fire", "Francis Meets a Leper", "Saint Francis and the Birds", "St. Clare Dies at Her Mirror", "St. Francis and the Sow, Bonaventure, Clare, Dante, David Citino, Duns Scotus, Galway Kinnell, Life of a Saint: After Giotto, Marilyn Nelson, Murray Bodo, Paradiso, Plato, Seamus Heaney, St. Francis, Thomas of Celano | Comments closed

Holy Ghost: Warm Breast and Bright Wings

By Robin Bates | Published: January 14, 2023

Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” captures the magnificent but intimate moment when the Holy Spirit enters us.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "God's Grandeur", Holy Spirit | Comments closed

Tough Lives Need Poetry’s Toughness

By Robin Bates | Published: October 13, 2021

A new book on the psychology of life-changing lit has alerted me to some great passages.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Love (3)", bibliotherapy, George Herbert, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jan Mukarovsky, Jeanette Winterson, T. S. Eliot | Comments closed

A World Charged with God’s Grandeur

By Robin Bates | Published: May 16, 2020

Hopkins captures associates the Holy Spirit with the coming of spring, where we reconnect with nature’s beauty.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "God's Grandeur", "Spring", Holy Spirit | Comments closed