This one from Belloc is more like Kipling than Hopkins.

But it is Sunday, the theme is death, and I don’t merely want to put a satirical sonnet up.

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Belloc knew death was the last enemy, and that too many of us have pretensions. So he punctures them.

XXX

The world’s a stage — and I’m the Super man,
And no one seems responsible for salary.
I roar my part as loudly as I can
And all I mouth I mouth it to the gallery.
I haven’t got another rhyme in ” alery “
It would have made a better job, no doubt
If I had left attempt at Rhyming out,
Like Alfred Tennyson adapting Malory.

The world’s a stage, the company of which
Has very little talent and less reading :
But many a waddling heathen painted bitch
And many a standing cad of gutter breeding.
We sweat to learn our book : for all our pains
We pass. The Chucker-out alone remains.

Hilaire Belloc.