God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “God’s Grandeur” in 1877, the year he was ordained as a Jesuit priest. The poem was written as part of a series of sonnets–which include other notable poems like “The Starlight Night,” “In the Valley of the Elwy,” “The Windhover”—all of which were written while Hopkins was living at St. Beuno’s College in Wales and studying theology in preparation for his ordination into the church. “God’s Grandeur,” like many of the poems he wrote during this time, explores two of Hopkins’s most prominent themes: God and Nature.

Throughout his entire literary corpus, Hopkins straddles the line between tradition and innovation. In “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins utilizes his trademark experimentalism, evidenced by his unique use of internal rhymes and unusual rhythms, never fully adhering to the prevailing poetic structures. While his 1877 nature sonnets are in the traditional form of a sonnet, Hopkins uses the form to explore his admiration for God and what he calls “inscape,” or how God expresses himself through the natural world. To accomplish this, he invented a new metrical system, which he called “sprung rhythm,” a type of rhythm that imitates natural speech patterns. With sprung rhythm, his poems both adhere to the rules of iambic pentameter and formal rhyme schemes while at the same time subverting them for a more spontaneous mode of lyricism. Inflected by his religious background, many of his poems, including “God’s Grandeur,” focus themselves on finding God in nature and in language, or what he calls “instress,” the particularity of God’s presence in the physical world.

Unlike other poets from the Victorian era (1837-1901), Gerard Manley Hopkins is not an easy poet to categorize. Hopkins’s poetic sensibility was neither Romantic nor Victorian but planted within both traditions. He innovated throughout his writing career, experimenting with internal rhyme schemes, alliterations, consonance and assonance, as well as neologisms. Despite his forward-thinking approach to poetry, Hopkins was not recognized as an accomplished poet during his lifetime, with many of his poems being rejected for publication. The significance of his work would not be recognized until after his death.

Poet Biography

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born to a Protestant family on July 28, 1844. His parents were both educated and informed Hopkins’s interest in philosophy, literature, and the arts. He attended Balliol College in Oxford from 1863 to 1867. At Balliol, he studied classics and developed relationships with established poets, such as Christina Rossetti and Walter Pater, who would become his greatest contemporary influences and who would become vital in his posthumous recognition as a poet. However, when he joined the Catholic Church on October 21, 1866, he became estranged from his family and many of his friends.

While Hopkins was drawn to the visual arts and poetry, he gave up the craft when he decided to become a Jesuit priest, as he believed his pursuit of beauty in the arts prevented him from his complete devotion to his religious beliefs. A year after he graduated from Balliol College in 1867, he burned much of the poetry he had written and didn’t write a single line of verse for nearly seven years.

Hopkins began his practice as a Jesuit in September of 1867, taking vows of poverty and fulfilling his desire for an ascetic life. But in 1872, he returned to his work as a poet and artist after reading the work of the Catholic priest Duns Scotus, where he discovered that he could satisfy his religious devotion through poetry. He finally began to write again in 1875 when he wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a long-form poem that details the disaster of a steamship that left 157 people dead. Just a few months before his ordination into the Jesuit order in 1877, he finished God’s Grandeur, his sonnet cycle that explored God’s presence in the natural world.

However, the remainder of Hopkins’s life would be plagued by melancholy. His work as a Jesuit priest and teacher moved him from city to city across England where he worked as a minister and taught Greek and Latin in various colleges. But the life of a Jesuit priest was isolated, which is reflected in much of his later poetry, particularly poems such as “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, not Day.” While his literary accomplishments were not recognized in his own time, his work would finally find posthumous recognition and publication in 1918 and would become canonized by 1930 when some of the Modernist poets found inspiration in his literary experiments in form, style, and rhythm.

Poem Text

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.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “God’s Grandeur.” 1877. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Gerard Manley Hopkins composed “God’s Grandeur” as a traditional Italian sonnet (see Literary Devices). The first stanza of the sonnet (known as the octet) begins with Hopkins observing God’s presence in the world, describing it as “charged with the grandeur of God” (Line 1). Following the first line, Hopkins guides the reader through a series of metaphors in which we see God’s presence “flame out” and “shining from shook foil” (Line 2). However, Hopkins takes a turn when he asks the question at the core of the poem: “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” (Line 4). In other words, Hopkins asks the reader why humans do not pay heed to God’s grandeur.

The last half of the octet reveals Hopkins at his most pessimistic and misanthropic, depicting generations of people who “have trod, have trod, have trod” (Line 5) over God’s creation, nature. Humankind, Hopkins says in the final line of the octet, cannot even feel the world beneath its feet anymore, “being shod” (Line 8).

The second stanza of the sonnet (known as the sestet) shows a drastic turn or “volta” in the poem. Hopkins turns his attention away from his disgust of humankind and returns to a celebration of the natural world. The second stanza states that, in spite of humankind’s transgressions, “nature is never spent” (Line 9) because God and the Holy Spirit continue to care for the world “with warm breast” and “bright wings” (Line 14), reflecting the hope in Hopkins’s religious beliefs.