I’m not enough of what you need, and I’m too much of what could be the death of all of us.  My words don’t meld and float like cracked leaves on an icy, cold river.  They fall hard to the ground like rocks crumbling off a cliff, reminding us of gravity but not inspiring us to greatness.  You sing a melody that I once knew, but it rests painfully on ears that appear, more often than not, to be unable to hear.  Nonetheless, I’m not the only one who can’t seem hum to this song quite like it was written.  Hopkins, Eliot, Auden, and Lewis all displayed the same melodious perpetuity of struggle.  Perhaps I’ll wear white, flannel trousers and let the awkwardness of this age present itself unabashedly.  Thomas Stearns and I would have been brilliant friends – he in his tweed, three-piece suit and horn-rimmed glasses, and I with my white, bare, braceleted arms.  We would have been quite the pair.  Would he digress do you think?  I don’t know.  Those days are gone, but were it not for his laments, I wouldn’t know that I’m not alone.  But while Eliot reminds me that I was meant for a different place, and Auden sings the songs of pain and compassion, and Lewis profoundly asks the questions that I am afraid to think, it is Hopkins who raises his voice best above the loud clamor of the streetcars and pedestrians this night.  He brings to my mind the melody that, only moments ago, seemed inaudible under the refuse of my heart.  "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," and "He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him" (from God's Grandeur and Pied Beauty).