Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

For the past few years I've had a sheaf of memory-poems kept by my dresser; I'll read/recite one every morning while I'm getting ready, sticking with each one till it's memorized. Here's one from a long time back (and coming late in the season—just a week and a half before the solstice):

SPRING

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

[via Bartleby.com]

I'm hoping to include these memory-poems from time to time in the new nblinks incarnation. I probably should look around to see the exact legality of quoting full poems before I start busting out the Czeslaw Milosz or Seamus Heaney.