The world was made familiar by your face.
I n a loving face we find our truth.
Without such love the world’s a bitter space.
The world was made familiar by your face
And in your arms I found the best embrace
Without your words the world seems base, uncouth.
The world was made familiar by your face
In a loving face we find our truth
https://poets.org/poem/habit-perfection
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Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only make you eloquent.
Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark
And find the uncreated light:
This ruck and reel which you remark
Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.
Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,
Desire not to be rinsed with wine:
The can must be so sweet, the crust
So fresh that come in fasts divine!
Nostrils, our careless breath that spend
Upon the stir and keep of pride,
What relish shall the censers send
Along the sanctuary side!
O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet
That want the yield of plushy sward,
But you shall walk the golden street
And you unhouse and house the Lord.
And, Poverty, be thou the bride
And now the marriage feast begun,
And lily-coloured clothes provide
Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins
Themes
About this Poem
Originally written in 1866, a fragment from “The Habit of Perfection” was first published in Robert Seymour Bridges’s anthology The Spirit of Man: An Anthology in English & French from the Philosophers & Poets (Longmans Green & Co., 1916). In “Food Metaphors in Gerard Manley Hopkins,” published in Victorian Poetry, vol. 55, no. 3 (Fall 2017), Mariaconcetta Costantini, professor of English at D’Annunzio University of Chieti–Pescara, Italy, writes, “Another struggle against the lure of the senses, including taste, is dramatized in ‘The Habit of Perfection.’ Like other lyrics of Hopkins’s university years, this poem in quatrains exalts the human capacity for renouncing physical pleasures in favor of spiritual ones [. . .]. [T]he poet turns the body and its perceptive organs into vehicles for achieving a condition of bliss that entails the final rejection of corporeality. Such a strategy is evident at the beginning of each quatrain, which opens with a direct reference to man’s sensual powers of perception / communication: hearing, speaking, seeing, tasting, smelling and touching. Stanza four, in particular, focuses on the pleasures of the palate—‘the hutch of tasty lust’—which are visibly evoked before the invitation to transcend them. Despite the use of negation, the speaker gives flesh to the palate’s ‘desire . . . to be rinsed with wine,’ while the other references to drinks and aliments (‘The can . . . so sweet, the crust / So fresh’) attach physical valences to the ‘fasts divine.’”
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The boughs, the boughs are bare enough,
But earth has not yet felt the snow.
Frost-fringed our ivies are, and rough
With spiked rime the brambles show,
The hoarse leaves crawl on hissing ground,
What time the sighing wind is low.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
1863
On ear and ear two noises too old to end
Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
1918
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Gerard Manley Hopkins
2018
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I must be far from men and women
To love their ways.
I must be on a mountain
Breathing greatly like a tree
If my heart would yearn a little
For the peopled, placid valley.
I must be in a bare place
And lonely as a moon
To find the graceless ways of people
Elsa Gidlow
1923
I walked along the countryside
At eventide,
And everywhere
The road was fair
With moons of water here and there,
Into whose heart the grasses spied.
And suddenly upon them shone
The light of the City’s eye,
Reflected from a bulb on high.
Ameen Rihani
1921
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquility;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea;
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder—everlastingly.
William Wordsworth
1807
Email Address
© Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038
In the 60’s women wore a tiny mini- skirts
[Which seems odd now, as we wear trousers most]
Then bought longer ones should Vogue direct
We wore minis, stockings with grip welts
Cool in summer, chilly in the frost
Once all women wore wool winter skirts
Trousers made us free from fashions cracked
As long as we had slender tapered waists
We bought versions of Parisian taste direct.
But recently we see the trousers whacked
They must be short this year or lack good taste
They’re up and down our calves just like the skirts
And though we hated belts, suspender packed
We now must buy a longer type of sock
To close the gap the shorter trousers make.
So I make my case that women’s trousers lack
Virtue, beauty, wonder, colour based
I think it’s time that skirts should now be backed
Let us admire the daring females most
Who wander flower-skirted to the coast
Let us humans tear off all that hurts!
We need comfort, let the fashions flirt!
Through the TV series fun on Saturdays,
They educate us to our foreign ways
We’re blind to our own prejudice, you see.
But we can see it on our dramatised TV.
Our mind’s a stranger to our self;
As Freud discovered with his stealth
We make believe we are all saints.
In words, by gum, it doesn’t half sound quaint!
Tonight on Taggart we see Poles
Shot at close range, here, look, bullet holes.
They’re foreign though they were born here.
And, by the way, your auntie’s queer.
We want a game like chess with rules
Make it black and white, we’re fools.
We forget the Last Judgment’s here today
And God is foreign, by the way.
God’s the foreigner par excellence
He sent us Son down here just once
But like we often do, we killed
They’re using TV now to change our wills.
Enlighten us, dear God, by screens of blue
Make us understand we’re foreign too
We don’t need to go to Church
The TV’s on and here I perch
The Lord’s my Shepherd,I’ll not scratch.
Oh, raise me with words
Underneath the arches,I’ll sit and eat my shoe.
Scarlet ribbons made her glare.
Guardian angels set heaven alight.
Wraiths of our fathers ‘ living bill.
God blessed our Hope
Yesterpray.
Welcome to the Communist State of Diarrhea.
You keep sewing your way.
In search of lost crimes with Marred Cell Pouffe.
A still small choice .
Ezekiel,why are you Lear?
My fiance was a Jew until he met me.Then there were three.His mother made a big impression on me… with her shoe!
Don’t believe all I write.I have blurred derision and fantasy.
The Lord’s my shepherd,so he taunts.
Ezekiel sits on the floor eating an orange
He has four teeth, he can stand up.
He can’t walk yet but he dances.
He’s as tall as the table
What are you thinking Ezekiel?
You are murmuring and muttering
You are singing and whispering
Speaking in words and sentences is in a way or diminishment of all this.
I can see what we lose as we grow older
Oh happy,Ezekiel, you like oranges.
You want something and it appears as if by magic.
It appears as if you created it.
Be our guest
I bought a talking watch because I couldn’t read The Watch face but I forgot I am also hard of hearing
My phone is too big to fasten to my wrist
Can you get braille watches? Combined with hearing aids….
By this stage of life maybe you don’t need to know what time it is
Can’t we be like animals going by the sun and the moon?
, Now therapy usurps the place of faith
And into our own minds, we’re told to delve
Whatever we now think, we have to say it In that way, Freud thinks we find a truer self. The therapist is like a looking glass
They just reflect whatever we have bared.
But if we look to long, it comes to pass
That Satan and his devils are prepared.
They may enchant us into false self love
To value pride and then deceive our souls;
Yet to humble people comes the holy dove.
And self-forgetting is what makes us whole.
Confused, alarmed and reckless with despair.
Look out, not in, and find salvation there
When true love’s gone and doom hangs over head
When life runs like a river to the sea
Then shall I take new lovers to my bed
And with their carnal touch consoled be?
When lovers lie and break my woman’s heart.
When life seems grey and rocks bestrew my path.
Then, shall I my life of evil start
And on the world shall I bestow my wrath?
When my love lies and wrecks all loyalty.
When puzzlement makes all the world seem mad.
Then I shall upend causality
And let myself do deeds which make me glad.
I have the fruits of love within my heart.
Sorrow will not tear me into parts
The dread that can’t be named has seized my mind
I cannot breathe, my body feels remote.
A speechless infant seeks but cannot find.
What awe, what shock, had crossed my mother’s face .
An image with no name from this I brought
I lay and trembled in her tight embrace.
The image is a rock that blocks my path
A rock that can’t be moved or thrown or caught
Like the gorgon’s head of ugly wrath.
I wish my songs to be a mirror bright
I shall find a way to earn the right
As Perseus killed the Gorgon without sight
I need the shield of poetry in the night
Oh, mug, so noble, men might worship you
You hold a pint of Earl Grey Tea with milk.
That’s more than I can fit inside my shoe.
The very notion makes my body wilt.
From Amazon, you traveled all alone
Until I took you to my heart complete.
I shall never stir my tea with bones.
Not shall I for my writing press, delete.
I drink a pint of tea when dawn arrives
I dream of broken teeth and opiate drugs.
But when I waken, I am still alive
And to an opiate,I prefer a mug.
Yet has my life been abstinent and harsh?
Still my mouth can never , now, be parched!
Why don’t we hear more about the bladderoscomy?
Next they’ll be putting cameras into our ears but are the eustachian tubes large enough?
Which is larger the urethra or the eye of a needle?
Just think what might be living inside your kidney and you won’t even know until one day you have a terrible pain and it’s not your period.
I have had sepsis twice but will I make it through a third episode? On the one hand yes I must be very strong to survive twice so on that basis I predict I will go on surviving it forever until I die of something else
But my infirmity is no reason at all for Trump to bomb Iran or indeed to bomb anywhere at all in the world.
There’s probably a name for this but it’s the opposite of feeling that you are responsible for all the sin and suffering in the world.
We just have to accept we’re responsible for a small amount of it but we’re also responsible for a larger amount of goodness kindness decency humour love friendship care and community spirit. And much more . Like the preservation of ancient churches and other buildings. On the medical research that’s ongoing in the NHS and our universities.
The still small voice is of no use to the deaf.
What does the Pope think of the bombing of Iran?
Please accept our creepiest symphony.
With sweetest tympani.
Please accept my commiseration despite your looming con scription. You won’t miss her when you’re in the army invading Iran.
Loss is always a tradein
I’m so sorry that your husband lied. At least it won’t happen again.
We live in hope of an insurrection
When will the geeks inherit this laugh?
I’m so sorry to hear about your blister. She should not have gone astray.
When is the humeral to be belled?
He left me his new router. Saturday the cat died as well.
He left his cheapest empathy on my Facebook page
I am sad that you are so lonely with your thief.
If she believed in Devon, she kept it riot.
I will always remember that a dog shook hands with my husband in heartlands in Devon
I haven’t had time to make a world so could I buy one?
I found his last bill and pissed lament
I said I wanted to see Jesus I didn’t mean that I wanted to die a liar.
If you die I’ll be very angry and I really screamed that. But it was too fake. You never relieved me.
Do you think that God is working for us when we lie ?
Does God dismember everything?
He said he was working for the still small voice I didn’t really believe that but I am deaf. God should shout not whimper
When you are dead you have blood that will not percolate anymore.
Who is the person who makes our blood flow around our bodies?
There’s a music played by all the blood circulating in harmony around the bodies of those who are close together but I wonder who can hear this?
Shall I miss the journeys that we made
Up sheer cliffs and through deep muddy yards
Chased by geese and then with heather laid?
I cannot catch you now, it is too far.
You cleaned my boots back in the cottage sweet
On the bed, you covered me in coats
Tenderly you stroked my crooked feet
And hot and sugared tea you once more brought
A dog stopped by and held out its clean paw
It shook your hand and gazed with amber eyes
Remote and cold, the Hartland Cliffs we saw
Where have you got to now, my love, disguised?
Danger and delight then drew us on
I cannot find your face, where have you gone?
Which would you prefer
An angiogram
An inflexible cystoscopy
Open heart surgery
Bunions surgery on both your feet simultaneously
Sudden death?
What do you like for breakfast
Fried brains on wholemeal bread
Black pudding with fried tomatoes
Sliced haggis
Buttered toast well licked by your cat.
Two Weetabix and a banana?
What would you like the nurse to do
Try to put a cannula into your arm and burst a weather vane. Sorry I meant your vein.
Inject you with broad spectrum antibiotics with a blunt needle.
Give you an enema
Wash you all over with fairy liquid and cold water?
Read you a story about Donald Duck the evil orange murderer. He is getting to be worse than Satan
All of the above?
After all, the worst thing is being bored, being alone and being sick.
We don’t know what it’s like to be dead until we die and then we can’t come back and tell anybody although I did see my husband once.
I saw him in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep because my friend had been run over and my husband was very fond of her so he appeared in my bedroom and said when I heard I had to come back unfortunately he was only there for about two minutes.
Talk about shock and awe.
I had a CT scan today
It’s free so you don’t have to pay.
The iodine is great
If you want to mate.
Otherwise, it improves the display.
Yes they broadcast my scan on TV
I am never embarrassed, you see.
My kidneys are swell
How can they tell ?
Is it something they put in the tea?
They tell me the iodine’s less risky.
It’s not Viagra so it won’t make you frisky.
Believe me, I know.
I hoped it was so.
The only man who came near was a pixie.
Maybe I should be more alert
And make my voice pleasant not curt
Keep an eye out for men
Although not for Big Ben
I’m so shy I don’t even dare sweat
Do you think Meter Pandelson’s rich?
He got £75,000 on that pitch
He wanted much more
He’s terribly poor
I wonder where he bought all that kitsch?
The face that was familiar is no more
The people in the streets seem bland as wheat
I dream I hear your key turn in the door
How you loved to walk on long seashores.
The sands of Norfolk charmed our curving feet
The face that was familiar is no more
I’d like to die right here on this floor
Why should I live now in love’s defeat
I think I hear your key turn in the door.
I never knew the pain that old folk bore.
They did not speak and left us with deceit
The face that was familiar is no more
I wish someone would seize my heart, it is so sore
If only we were words, I’d press delete
I thought I heard your key turn in the door
I remember Southwold and our seat
We’d cross the river Blyth, the people weep.
The face that was familiar is no more
Yet I hear the key turn in the door
Read me if you will but don’t believe
No human mind is pure enough to read
For through a poet’s words, one may deceive.
Yet we need a language to perceive.
And through our words we sow our our fruitful seeds
Read me if you must but don’t believe.
In such writing what can one achieve?
Who would cut the heart and make it bleed ?
Through my poet’s words I may deceive.
When we’re wandering dange can impede
Read me if you will but don’t believe.
Yet through a language every thought’s conceived.
Language is impure and so are deeds
Everything we say say may well deceive
We disbelieve the truth for what we need.
In our hearts and souls it’s love that pleads
Read me if you will but don’t believe
Everything I tell you might deceive
Do not be afraid of sacred fire
Did Joan of Arc lack courage at the end?
Kill obsessive thoughts, such thoughts are liars
In the fire the sacred dove descends
Trust in this and what it must portend
Do not be afraid of sacred fire
The angels hang in beauty in the choir.
Do not be afraid of sacred fire
No Joan of Arc lacks courage at the end
I didn’t know I’d miss you
With all my loving heart.
But as we’re made of fragile flesh
We must sadly part.
If you had been a sadist
If you had been unkind.
I would not be grieving by
And losing my own mind.
So maybe I should be grateful
For being found and known.
I wish you were still sitting here. And I were not alone.
When we feel so lonely
No-one else will do
It’s not that I’m just lonely
I’m lonely, just for you.
The face that was familiar is no more.
I search each face as people pass me by
I cannot find you so my heart is sore.
The face that was familiar is no more.
My future’s empty, sadness drifts before
There is no god and no one to implore.
There is no mother, comfortless I cry
The face that was familiar is no more.
I weep before the people who pass by.
The pain was excruciatingly sharp
As she plucked on the strings of my heart.
What she was after
I never even asked her
But her bowing was, to my mind, not smart.
Intellectuals think limericks non de trop;
Incrementally better than faux.
But when times are inclement
Enjoy a bright moment.
For one day we each have to go.
My bowels are a nuisance to me
Yet without them how bereft we would be
In fact we’d be dead
And as St Paul said
The glass is now dark,but we’ll see.
Pain must be approached with some stealth
As aggravating it’s bad for our health
Accept it and bear it
And never,ever fear it.
Relaxation is the best form of wealth
My this metal bed is very hard Mary thought she lay on the scanner. Where should I look? Just keep my eyes closed that’s the best.
I think the iodine will have got into your kidneys by now, she heard a male voice say
Well I can’t feel anything but as long as you can see something I am happy Mary told them suddenly her phone rang.
It was nside her capacious bra Mary had forgotten.
Luckily she was not inside the scanner so she pulled it out and handed it to the radiographer who was standing by her side.
It’s lucky it wasn’t inside my knickers I suppose but then we don’t have those knickers that women used to wear in Victorian times with elasticated legs coming halfway down the thighs but they would be very useful. Actually my mother-in-law used to carry a handkerchief there.
Mary’s mind drifted on. Her shoulders were aching because she had to hold her arms vertically behind her which meant they were actually horizontal.
Finally they had finished and she sat up with the aid of the radiographer because the room was spinning round and round.
Well this makes a change, she told Annie. Then she heard a noise that sounded like a cat meowing
Have you got Emile inside your handbag she asked Annie?
Well yes I have because I did not want to be alone in the wait ing room while you were having your scan.
I don’t know if that’s a good enough reason…
we could have brought another person with us like that man who lives in the house across the road it’s about time we got to know him.
Mary you’re acting very strangely you’ve never expressed interest in men before not since we lost Stan
Well maybe it’s the iodine if it goes into my kidneys and bladder gets into my womb
Maybe iodine is like viagra for womenm I can’t say what it does for men .
But do not drink iodine at home as I will not be answerable for the consequences no will I pay for you to go to a nursing home to have a baby if you become pregnant after reading this storym
short-eared durham owl
meditating over the dale’s edge,
shadows the fields and folds
in elegant diurnal flight.
on wind-side,careful sight,
may swoop to prey
and away.
your yellow broad-eyed look,
at once both sharp and distant,
holds me.
oh,silence,
oh,wind on green,
oh,earth,
sky.
immense your held vision,
sphere without center,
pied geometer of flight,
oh, swift descent and ascent.
trees bunched by dry stone wall
call heart home
Mary went to the hospital to have her CT scan. As usual she was a companies by her friend Anne. But she didn’t know that Emile the cat was in Anna’s handbag today.
As you know some women like to have very big handbags but have you never wondered what they are carrying inside these bags?
Annie, they are going to put some iodine into one of my veins, she informed her friend .
Well it doesn’t matter which one they’re putting it into because all your blood circulates around your entire body is it once every 24 hours or is it once a year I’m not sure.
I think you’re thinking about the sun and the earth and the moon which has got nothing to do with the human circulatory system.
Yes Mary I think you’re right I was never very good at science.
And you have no common sense either
How could it take a whole year for the blood to circulates round my body. I would turn into a stone!
I just wasn’t thinking properly I apologize. But why should I apologize because I was born like this… in the lower half of the normal curve for the IQ. God must be very good at statistics.
Oh don’t worry I know what it’s like I’m sure I will say something quite stupid while I’m in the hospital. Doctors seem to bring out the worst in me.
If you feel like that maybe you shouldn’t speak at. After all irs only scan of your kidneys not your brain.
Do you think if you’re having a brain scan that talking will make the scan come out differently? It seems a ridiculous idea to me but you never know is these days especially if you watch Fox News.
Mary lay down on the on the cold metal bed that was part of the CT scanner.
Will it be alright if I put a cannula into your arm, the nurse enquired kindly?
If I say no, what will you do Mary asked
Well it’s not really a question it’s just a form of politeness so we don’t just grab your arm and stick the cannula in as it will be seen as very invasive.
You are in a very powerful position aren’t you as a nurse here before you could ask me a question which I cannot actually give a truthful answer to because I don’t like having cannulas put in. I really don’t want you to put it in but I have read the explanation on the internet and I realised it will better if you do put it in.
You really need to study philosophy and language and many other topics before you could understand these pseudo questions that doctors had nurses and other people may ask you.
Why it’s almost as if Benjamin Netanyahu rang up the new Ruler of Iran and asked him would he mind he dropped a bomb on his home.?
If they did that then they would say it wasn’t a war because the Iranian person had agreed or at least not disagreed when he was asked if he would mind having a bomb dropped on him.
Is it what they call a rhetorical question asked Annie nervously as she stroked Mary’s cat Emile who was in her handbag without permission of the hospital.
I knew I shouldn’t have brought a cat she thought anxiously.
If he meows it will cause a lot of trouble and since Mary can’t see him or touch him it’s of no benefit to her that he is nearby. I must be out of my mind she thought. Don’t tell me I’m getting dementia.
To be continued
The face that was familiar is no more
I gaze into the crowds, but see no sign
I’m fearful like a child lost on a beach
But no one I see here can I call mine.
The face that was familiar disappeared.
I can’t believe you’re nowhere I can find
And as you are gone my own small self has too
I’ve lost my soul, and I might lose my mind
The face that was familiar is no more.
I cannot see or love you as I did.
I wonder where to walk and where to rest.
My feverish ramblings do my half wit’s bid
The face that was familiar is no more
And my own eyes with weeping are now sore.
The face that was familiar is no more
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again
If ,by a chance, his life could be restored
It would affect me like the hidden chord
Which played, my own life force would go.
That one must live and one must die is plain
The face that was familiar is no more.
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again
The setting sun reflected hits my eyes
Beautifies the branches multiplied
While daisies bloom in January frost
Deception of the seasons is a loss
Climate change has made the air too warm
Too soon misguided bees may start to swarm.
We live without a thought until we see
The deaths of summer flowers the bumblebee.
Yet the strange reflections in my eyes
Fill me with that ancient, wild surmise.
Although we long for comfort, stable times
We also long for change though in disguise
Enraged by boredom, tired before the night.
What is the way to gain some new insight?
I think it is to find a slower way.
In between each breath a moment’s prayer
No need to fight a tiger on the lawn
Or kill the hippopotamus forlorn
That moment of reflection was so brief
The sun shone in my eyes, it was no thief.
So much depends on mood and time of day
We interpret or mis-shape what we perceive.
The sun may shine to show a better way
Or absent that, a transient cloud deceive.
No lowing herds wind down our oil fumed roads.
Tranquillity at dusk has disappeared.
With artificial light the daytime mode’s
Prolonged and reverie’s feared.
To truly live we must be incarnate.
God himself has paid this price alone.
For time misspent we do not get rebate.
As ,like the leaves in wind, away we’re blown.
To live aright perception must be clear
Including in its breadth all that we fear.
