Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Alchemist in the City

Gerard Manley Hopkins

(1844 – 1889)

 

The Alchemist in the City

 

My window shews the travelling clouds,

Leaves spent, new seasons, alter’d sky,

The making and the melting crowds:

The whole world passes; I stand by.

 

They do not waste their meted hours,

But men and masters plan and build:

I see the crowning of their towers,

And happy promises fulfill’d.

 

And I – perhaps if my intent

Could count on prediluvian age,

The labours I should then have spent

Might so attain their heritage,

 

But now before the pot can glow

With not to be discover’d gold,

At length the bellows shall not blow,

The furnace shall at last be cold.

 

Yet it is now too late to heal

The incapable and cumbrous shame

Which makes me when with men I deal

More powerless than the blind or lame.

 

No, I should love the city less

Even than this my thankless lore;

But I desire the wilderness

Or weeded landslips of the shore.

 

I walk my breezy belvedere

To watch the low or levant sun,

I see the city pigeons veer,

I mark the tower swallows run

 

Between the tower-top and the ground

Below me in the bearing air;

Then find in the horizon-round

One spot and hunger to be there.

 

And then I hate the most that lore

That holds no promise of success;

Then sweetest seems the houseless shore,

Then free and kind the wilderness,

 

Or ancient mounds that cover bones,

Or rocks where rockdoves do repair

And trees of terebinth and stones

And silence and a gulf of air.

 

There on a long and squared height

After the sunset I would lie,

And pierce the yellow waxen light

With free long looking, ere I die.

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry

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