Backlit Glory

One of the few literary arguments my husband and I have is about the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I love Hopkins' "sprung rhythm" and the powerful language that recalls Anglo-Saxon poetry. My husband jokes that teaching Hopkins (which I do often) should be grounds for dismissal, such is his dislike.

As I drove in the driveway this morning, some tulips in my garden were wonderfully backlit. I just had to take these photos. When I put them up on the computer, lines from Hopkins came to me unbidden from his poem "God's Grandeur":


The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like the shining from shook foil...

For me, any poet's words that come to mind in the face of such natural spectacle must not be so bad.