When my son Sebastian arrived at the age where one starts to tinker with video games, we fired up the original Super Mario Brothers: clunkier gameplay than I remembered, more monochromatic, but fun still. It was odd how my hand muscles remembered when the mushrooms would appear, how to do the roll-off move while holding down B to reach the flagpole at the end. I had every note of the two-bit music memorized. After a few minutes, my son wanted a turn, so I restarted it.
He practiced jumping, getting big, breaking some bricks with his head. And then he fell down one of those mine shafts they have everywhere and died. He started crying because his turn was over so fast. Sebastian is a zealot for fairness, so he handed the remote back to me.
“But you have another life,” I said. “Look at those hearts.”
The concept was lost on him. What did I mean by “another life”? It was funny to me, having grown up around video games. I guess I’ve always known that you get another ship or another guy or another whatever it is—you get another chance or two, even if you die in the gameplay. But my son had never heard of such a thing.
“Keep playing,” I coaxed.
*
The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins have been important to me since I first read them as an undergraduate. They are, for most readers, startling both in terms of language and theology. But it wasn’t until this last winter, when I was teaching them in a course on Victorian literature at Seattle Pacific University, that something clicked in the final lines of one of his most famous poems.
I’ve had it memorized for 20 years, but while trying to explain its concision and majesty to students hearing it for the first time, the thing just bloomed. “God’s Grandeur” begins,
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.
There’s a lot going on there about how the grandeur of God is a kind of electricity that animates life itself—that gives shocking power—but also about how his beauty and majesty is an accusation. J’accuse! There’s a charge leveled at us by the very nature of that beauty. We have to do something in response to it. As the poem goes on to describe, that charge involves both obedience and creation care.
I have to skip a lot, and a lot that’s good, because I want to talk about the final lines. After Hopkins describes the cost of humanity’s failure to respond appropriately to that grandeur—to “reck his rod”—he shifts, in the poem’s volta, to a stunning revelation: “for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down [in] things.”
How can this be?
In the poem, we’ve been accused of deafness, disobedience, of failure to sabbath, of allowing work and money to dominate our thinking, of being divorced from nature to the degree that our feet can’t even feel the ground anymore. We’ve been accused of stamping out all the wonder from the world in our march for progress, causing even the fairies’ departure from the once-charmed Irish soil as “the last lights off the black West went.” We’ve been charged with bringing darkness, night to everything, and rightly so.
Read the full essay at Ekstasis →
Originally published in Ekstasis, 2025-01-12.
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