The dearest freshness deep down things

When I was clearing my deck, and moving the flowerpots under shelter, then whenever the plant was dead, I would cut off all the dead stalks. The French lavender (lavandula dentata) already perished from the cold, but as I cut it back, even the dead, discolored foliage was fragrant. When I cut back the peppermint and spearmint, I thought I saw some small sprigs of green in the dirt of the pot. Those mints are so hardy that I never have to buy new ones in the spring. I just  fertilize the "dead" remains, and new shoots come up. Indeed, they grow so much I often have to keep chopping them ruthlessly back all summer to keep them at a size appropriate to their pots. I would never plant them in the ground for that reason. I would fear that in a couple years the whole yard would be peppermint. And, similarly, when I cut down the lemon balm, which seemed totally black and dead, there in the bottom lurked some tiny green leaves, and I thought of the line from Gerard Manley Hopkins, "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things."

So this evening I hunted up the poem online, and here it is.

God’s Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89)

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.