Creation Charged: Two Poems and a Picture

The Sower  Vincent van Gogh

God's Word is in all Creation

By Hildegard of Bingen

No creature has meaning

without the Word of God.

God's Word is in all creation,

visible and invisible.

The Word is living, being,

spirit, all verdant greening,

all creativity.

This Word flashes out in

every creature.

This is how the spirit is in

the flesh—

the Word is indivisible from God.

 God's Grandeur

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God. 

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;  

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.

Why do men then now not reck his rod? 

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;    

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;  

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:

the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.  

And for all this, nature is never spent;  

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;       

And though the last lights off the black West went 

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs

— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent  

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.