Poetry, Praise, and ”Pied Beauty” with Dr. Jason Baxter

Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit, was born in 1844 in Essex, England and died in 1889 in Dublin, Ireland. And while none of his poems were published during his lifetime, when they were published beginning in 1918, he was immediately heralded as one of the greatest poets of the Victorian Era.

Each year Wyoming Catholic College freshmen memorize, among other poems, Hopkin’s “Pied Beauty” and with him give thanks to God “for dappled things.”

Their enthusiastic, poetry-reciting professor is Dr. Jason Baxter who is our guest for this Thanksgiving edition of The After Dinner Scholar.

Wyoming Catholic College Poetry Anthology:

• “To an Athlete Dying Young,” A. E. Housman
• “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” John Keats
• “God’s Grandeur,” Gerard Manley Hopkins
• “The world is too much with us,” William Wordsworth
• “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost
• “What a piece of work is a man,” William Shakespeare
• Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare
• “Spring and Fall,” Gerard Manley Hopkins
• “Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins
• “Ozymandias,” Percy Shelly
• “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars,” Richard Lovelace
• Holy Sonnet XIV (“Batter my heart”), John Donne
• “Love III,” George Herbert
• General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
• “The quality of mercy is not strained,” William Shakespeare
• “Sonnet 94,” William Shakespeare
• “For once then, Something,” Robert Frost
• “The Tyger,” William Blake
• “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” William Butler Yeats
• “When you are old,” William Butler Yeats
• “Because I could not stop for death,” Emily Dickinson
• “Fire and Ice,” Robert Frost
• “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats