Hurrahing in Harvest

Wheat Field with Cypresses. Vincent van Gogh. 1889.
Wheat Field with Cypresses. Vincent van Gogh. 1889.

Hurrahing in Harvest

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded ever and melded across the skies?

 

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour,

And éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a

Rapturous loves’ greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

 

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—

These things, these things were here and but the beholder

Wanting; which two when they once meet,

The heart rears wings bold and bolder

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.