Friday, June 16, 2006

Dew Contempt

Apparently, the US bishops have no great love of dew, that watering of the earth that occurs without necessity of rain and storms: as one bishop is quoted: anything but dew!

If we miss dew in the liturgy, we can at least still find it in the poets . . .

Inversnaid
by Gerard Manly Hopkins

THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

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