Читать книгу The Priestly Poems of G.M. Hopkins - Peter Milward - Страница 6

“The world is charged.” What is the world? What are the things around us? Who are the persons surrounding us? Who are we in the midst of these things and persons? What is anything? Who is anyone? Here we are, with these things and these persons around us, “placed on this isthmus of a middle state”. All we know are a few things, a few persons. Our knowledge of them is hemmed in with ignorance, uncertainty, mere circumscription. The same is no less true of our self-knowledge.

“The world is charged.” Yet on this narrow world the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. So we are not entirely deprived of light, to see at least the outward circumference of things and persons. We are not entirely enveloped in darkness. At night, when it is dark, we go to sleep, losing ourselves in our ignorance. All the time we are alive, and our life is a kind of light, which is not extinguished till we die. And then, when we die, what will become of us? Is death no more than darkness? Is it true, what the Roman poet dared to say, “Nox est nobis una perpetua dormienda”? “For us it is a night in which we must sleep forever.”

“The world is charged.” Yet at least till we die we are alive. At least till darkness falls it is daytime. At least we have the present advantage of light and life. Then, we ask ourselves, what is this light, and what is this life? Is it just limited to the daytime, to our lifetime? “In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum, et lux in tenebris lucet”. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in darkness.”

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” So there are two eyes, two ways of seeing given to men, the way of eyesight in the physical sense and the way of inner sight in the spiritual sense. It is the latter way of inner sight that we call the way of faith, which enables us to see what our eyes cannot see. This is the way of God, which leads us from our lowly, earthly “I am” to the ideal, heavenly “I am”. It is the way which directs our mind in and above the world we see to the intangible, unknowable, inapprehensible world which is “charged with the grandeur of God.”

This is the “brave new world” celebrated by poets, who see things as they originally issued from the creative word of God in the beginning. As they come down in the first evolving process of creation, they are surrounded one by one with a strange, unearthly light. Like new-born babies, they smile on everything around them, as they open their eyes to the surrounding light. That light is around them, and it is also within them, in the smiling of their eyes. There is a new world in all the things they see, and in all the persons who see them, “charged with the grandeur of God.”

All is new, all is wonderful, all is natural and yet supernatural. All comes fresh from the hands of the Creator, from the creative Word, “Let there be light!” and from the divine breath of the Spirit. All is wrapped in the inexpressible gift of the Holy Trinity. And this is not just for all persons in general, but also for each person in particular. Each one of us may say of each thing on which we set our wondering eyes, “This is mine! This is God’s gift to me! This is for me, as if there were no other person in the wide world but me! In this gift God himself comes down to me and embraces me!”

In this sense the world is indeed “charged with the grandeur of God”. The world around us and within us is charged with his electrical presence. From that presence come sparks of divine light, or rather forked lightning of supernatural thunder. Everything we see is dazzling to our eyes, baffling to our ears, bewildering to our mind. It cannot be measured by any human measurement of length or breadth, height or depth. It can perhaps be measured in a narrow, scientific manner, restricted to the limits of matter, but it cannot in any meaningful manner, which looks beyond the realm of matter to that of spirit, “charged with the grandeur of God.”

In itself there is something infinite, something eternal, something defiant of measurement. In everything there is something that comes down from the original light, moving onward from the light of the rising sun to that of the setting sun. This is not only the light of the sun, but the light of everything that is irradiated and enlightened by the sun. And even when our little sun has set in the evening, there appear the greater lights of the twinkling stars above us at night. It is they who assure us, more than the sun in daytime, that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”.

Then, as the days pass in the course of the revolving year, from winter to spring and from summer to autumn, there is a further revelation. It is a revelation that is granted to us even in “the penalty of Adam, the seasons’ difference”. What is the cold of winter but a divine preparation for springtime? And what is spring but a taste of “the sweet being in the beginning in Eden garden”? And what is the heat of summer but a divine preparation for the time of autumn? And what is autumn, bringing the falling leaves, but a foretaste of the approaching end of all? From our beginning to our end, from light to darkness, and from life to death, what does it all denote but what the poet spells in “Spelt from Sibyl’s leaves”? What is it but “Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous, stupendous”? What is it but “charged with the grandeur of God”?

That is what the world proclaims to us not so much from dawn to dusk, within the cocoon of our earthly existence, as high up in the heavens, in the continued shining of the fixed stars. The grandeur of it all assures us that we who began to exist in the sunrise of birth will not cease to exist in the sunset of death. After all, the grandeur is not limited to the daily movement of the sun from light to darkness, as it were from life to death, but it is revealed all the time in the height of heaven. For so it is from the height of heaven that we hear, with the shepherds, the carol of the angelic host, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth!” – charged with the grandeur of God.

Nor is it only in the highest that the glory and grandeur of God is manifest to the wondering eyes of mortals on earth. But even in the depths of the earth, in the mines of gold and silver with all kinds of precious stones, his glory is revealed to the patient labor of human beings. Nor is it only in the bowels of the earth that his glory has to be discovered, like the treasure hidden in a field which has to be purchased by one who knows the secret of its presence. But also in the roots of plants, of trees and flowers, where their blossoms lie buried for a time during the cold months of winter, “shrunk to their mother-roots”, till they are summoned above ground by the warm sun and the scattered showers of spring – “charged with the grandeur of God.”

Then it is that we behold, with uncovered eyes, the divine truth that “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things”. It all comes up from the earth below to gladden our human eyes, reminding us of the earth’s “sweet being in the beginning”, as all these things come forth from the abundance of God’s bounty. Why? “Because,” Hopkins answers with an inspired “ah!”, “the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”