Illustration Friday: Mail

Okay....so this one requires some explanation. Well, maybe not "requires" but I'm going to give it anyway. For the topic of "mail," I thought of angels sending messages down to earth, only people have to be open to receiving them, and so I started sketching what that might look like. And once I started sketching (in pen, because that's what I do--I was in the back seat of the car driving to Kansas City to shop for a coat for my son, who was driving), I immediately thought of my all-time favorite poem, "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and an image from the end about how the holy ghost is bent over the world with "warm breast, and ah! bright wings." So this is it. It's a doodle, done almost entirely in the car, and it is what it is.

Here's the whole poem:

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.