Tuesday 9 February 2010

Poetry Snips

Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east …

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).  Poems  1918.   The Wreck of the Deutschland, line 277

What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in Reason? how infinite in faculty? in forme and mouing how expresse and admirable? in Action, how like an Angel? in apprehension, how like a God? the beauty of the world, the Parragon of Animals; and yet to me, what is this Quintessence of Dust?

William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Act II, Scene ii, 293-8)