NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
Interpretation
This quote addresses the struggle against despair and the human will to hope against adversity.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's quote captures a profound internal conflict where the speaker rejects despair and the notion of surrendering to hopelessness. It conveys the essence of human resilience, emphasizing a battle between dark thoughts and the enduring light of hope, as the speaker insists on the possibility of choosing to exist optimistically, regardless of their current tribulations.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
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.
Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies! Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.
Birds buildbut not I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine,O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
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 lightning to hear him sing.
For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
It is not the walls that make the city, but the people who live within them. The walls of London may be battered, but the spirit of the Londoner stands resolute and undismayed.
He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes, he is.
The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical. . . . Any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.
The tree of life knows that, whatever happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths them and the land plows and loves them.
Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.
The emptiness I speak about is not the emptiness the mind imagines. It is not blank. Your body can continue expressing in a natural way. Intelligence is there. Emotions can come. Everything can play, but inside there is total serenity and peace. No planning, no strategising, no personal identity is there. Just the space of pure being. It is what we are, but we dream and believe we are not.
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