Endings

Transitions are always hard.  Jeff and I are in our very last days here, trying to wrap up and close down the life we have built together in The Hague.  Meanwhile the weather has suddenly turned sunny and warm, beautiful fall days that make one feel prematurely nostalgic, like you are still living in what is already the past.

As a goodbye present for someone dear to me, I picked up a collection of poems by my favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins - a Victorian whose language was ahead of his times and whose love of nature was deeply spiritual.  Looking over the book, I am reminded that I don't read enough poetry.  This one, which has always been one of my favorites, feels particularly timely:

Hurrahing in Harvest

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;

And, eyes, hearts, what looks, what lips yet gave you a

Rapturous love's greetings of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

Majestic--as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!--

These things, these things were here and but the beholder 

Wanting; which two when they once meet,

The heart rears wings bold and bolder,

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.