King Charles has given a superb reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) poem, "God's Grandeur." It is an inspiring Christian message in these dark anti-Christ times. The link to the reading is below, and the poem reproduced. It will bring tears of joy to any Christian's eyes.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/king_charles_does_a_good_thing.html
"As the U.K. slips into wokesterly radicalism and ruin, King Charles, who is in treatment for cancer, has raised a flag of hope to counter it.
He read poetry to the people, beautiful, beautiful poetry, written by 19th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, praising God for the glory of nature, undoubtedly as he saw it in the U.K.
As England looks up from its wokester ruins, poetry of that kind reminds Britain why it's great. The U.K. needed that.
Not only is Hopkins's poetry beautiful in itself on the page, its beauty is intensified by King Charles's sonorous, expressive, reading of it, getting tone, pace, cadence and everything else exactly right. It's a professional sort of reading worthy of James Earl Jones, and whether King Charles was trained to do it that way, or it just came naturally, it enhances the poetry spectacularly, bringing its meaning to life. One commentator in this tweet speculated that it was because King Charles studied the Welsh language significantly, a language well known for its poetry and poets.
An English-language German website called english.Katholische.de looked into what this was about, intrigued as many were, by King Charles, being the head of the Church of England, reading from Hopkins, who was a very Catholic English poet as well as a Jesuit priest. They wrote:
"Invited is the world with God's majesty": these are the opening words of a video that has gone viral on the platform "X" and shows the English King Charles III reciting a poem by an English Jesuit. The monarch, who is also the head of the Anglican Church of England, recites the poem "God's Grandeur" by the poet and Catholic religious Gerard Manley Hopkins in the recording, which is just under two minutes long. It was uploaded to "X" on Wednesday afternoon and had been viewed almost 900,000 times and shared 970 times by midday on Friday.
I'm not sure Hopkins's Catholicism is all that important -- he just wrote a really beautiful poem, and surely King Charles, who loves English nature, would like that poem. But perhaps there was significance there, too, now that the Church of England reportedly says it wants to drop the word 'church' from its name, presumably to become an NGO. Maybe there was a reaction of some kind to trends in that, too.
But the website found out that the reading of the poem wasn't exactly new. It was done in 2021.
The video has now gone viral, but dates back to 2021, when the current King Charles III was still heir to the throne. Charles ascended the English throne following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in September 2022 and was crowned in Westminster Abbey Church in May last year. The video was recorded for Easter three years ago and shown during a service on Easter Sunday 2021 at the English boarding school Stonyhurst College. The author of the poem, Hopkins, had worked there as a teacher. At the time, Charles' office described the video as "support for Christians around the world at Easter".
And I googled 'King Charles' and 'poetry' and found that he has done a lot of these -- poems of Wordsworth and other poets of the great treasure box of English poetry. The news is that this time, the video has gone viral, supporting the Christian heritage of the British people themselves, who are seeing their entire culture and rule of law go to hell under the current wokester regime.
Hopkins has a fascinating background, and the website went into it a little:
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford near London in 1844 and joined the so-called "Oxford Movement" during his studies at Oxford. Within the Anglican Church, this theological school of thought stood for the attempt to re-emphasise the Catholic principles of the Anglicans and move closer to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1866, Hopkins followed the example of the later Cardinal John Henry Newman and converted to Catholicism. Two years later, he joined the Jesuit order and, after working as a teacher, finally taught as a university professor in Dublin, where he died in 1889.
Hopkins wrote poetry throughout his life, but all of his poems were only published posthumously in 1918. The central theme of his poetry is the relationship between religion and nature. His poetry became particularly important due to innovations in rhythmic structure, which many English poets orientated themselves on after Hopkins.
When I was an exchange student at Oxford during my junior year, I recall how a Dominican priest at the Blackfriars consortium casually mentioned that the table we were studying at was the one Hopkins died on.
What can one say? England is full of treasures, history and meaning.
It thrills me that King Charles is bringing the beautiful poetry of Hopkins to so many more who may have never heard of him, and Hopkins's orientation towards praising God for the glories of nature is now being revisited. In tough times, this is a wonderful thing. It's a very kingly thing to do.
No wonder the video went viral. King Charles is to be thanked for bringing this gift to life."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huu2nBLP34Y
God's Grandeur
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."