So I go out: my little sweet is done:
I have drawn heat from this contagious sun:
To not ungentle death now forth I run….
Now I am minded to take pipe in hand
And yield a song to the decaying year…
So late the hoar green chestnut breaks a bud,
And feeds new leaves upon the winds of Fall;
So late there is no force in sap or blood;
The fruit against the wall
Loose on the stem has done its summering;
These should have starved with the green broods of spring,
Or never been at all;
Too late or else much, much too soon….
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), September 1864.
Along with the psalmist, the poet believed that through the created world God speaks: 'There is no speech, nor are there words; and their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth....' (Psalm 19:3-4). Hopkins believed that God's creation, and the things and beings within it, have what he called an 'instress', To understand his meaning one needs metaphorically to hyphenate the word: 'in-stress'. The verb, to 'stress' means to 'assign weight or importance' and, in the case of Psalm 19, to signify the God-given message of a thing by its existence, in this case an untimely Autumn bud. Here, Hopkins finds God speaking through a sign of new life, even in the autumn of life. God can do that even when it seems to us ‘too late’, or possibly ‘much too soon’!
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