Newsletter: January 2026
Greetings again, dear web friends, at the start of another year, which can breed various feelings – optimism in some, uncertainty in some, and cynicism in others: ‘It’s just another year. Do you really expect anything to change? Really??’
So I’m pondering a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins which you will probably know better than me. It’s a meditation, written in 1877, full of alliteration and allusion, on the relationship between God and the world, between man’s abuse of the planet and nature’s effervescence, between despair and hope. It both sings and it weeps which is why I read it every day, for it is always current, always topical.
We could read it now:
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. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I won’t walk over this poem with my hobnail boots of clumsy and directive interpretation. You will sense what matters to you. Read it again, note the phrases that most entertain your soul… and enjoy. As for myself, I’ll be speaking this poem out loud (better than reading it, in my experience) every day this year. That’s my only resolution. Join me if it feels worth it.
Hopkins’ life is an interesting one, if you wish to research further into the man behind the words. He was a great fan of Christina Rossetti (‘In the bleak midwinter’), and they managed to meet, but like Van Gogh, Hopkins achieved only posthumous fame for his writing. And while there was considerable darkness and melancholy towards the end, and a love that could not be named, when he died of typhoid aged 44, his final words were, ‘I am so happy. I am so happy.’ Is that a good ending?
And changing direction slightly, but only slightly, Hopkins’ line, ‘nature is never spent’ were words that inspired and drove my new illustrated story, The Great Garden Gospel. You are the first to hear of it, and if you’d like to know more, check it out here:
It could be in your wonderful hands next week.
And perhaps still topical, yes, I feel so, is my blog piece, The Useless Manger, which you can find here.
I feel emptiness is at the heart of a good start to the year.
And so thank you for your company again, for this mystical communion, which puts the ‘virtue’ into ‘virtual’; and in words much better than mine, here’s wishing you moments of ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’… for such moments shape our lives for good.
Let it be.
Simon x
