Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

54. On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People

O I ADMIRE and sorrow! The heart’s eye grieves

Discovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years.

A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves,

And beauty’s dearest veriest vein is tears.

Happy the father, mother of these! Too fast:

Not that, but thus far, all with frailty, blest

In one fair fall; but, for time’s aftercast,

Creatures all heft, hope, hazard, interest.

And are they thus? The fine, the fingering beams

Their young delightful hour do feature down

That fleeted else like day-dissolvèd dreams

Or ringlet-race on burling Barrow brown.

She leans on him with such contentment fond

As well the sister sits, would well the wife;

His looks, the soul’s own letters, see beyond,

Gaze on, and fall directly forth on life.

But ah, bright forelock, cluster that you are

Of favoured make and mind and health and youth,

Where lies your landmark, seamark, or soul’s star?

There’s none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth.

There ’s none but good can bé good, both for you

And what sways with you, maybe this sweet maid;

None good but God—a warning wavèd to

One once that was found wanting when Good weighed.

Man lives that list, that leaning in the will

No wisdom can forecast by gauge or guess,

The selfless self of self, most strange, most still,

Fast furled and all foredrawn to No or Yes.

Your feast of; that most in you earnest eye

May but call on your banes to more carouse.

Worst will the best. What worm was here, we cry,

To have havoc-pocked so, see, the hung-heavenward boughs?

Enough: corruption was the world’s first woe.

What need I strain my heart beyond my ken?

O but I bear my burning witness though

Against the wild and wanton work of men.
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