God’s Grandeur by G.M.Hopkins poem line by line explanation, British Literature - III, 2nd Year 3rd Semester, B.A English Literature

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BA English Literature
[2nd Year, 3rd Semester]
British Literature 
1.6. God’s Grandeur by G.M.Hopkins

About Poet:

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844 in Essex, England, regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. Hopkins introduced "sprung rhythm" in his poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland“. Hopkins decided to become a priest. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1868. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1877. In 1884, he became a professor of Greek at the Royal University College in Dublin. He died five years later from typhoid fever.

From 1885 he wrote another series of sonnets, beginning with “Carrion Comfort.” They show a sense of desolation produced partly by a sense of spiritual aridity and partly by a feeling of artistic frustration. These poems, known as the “terrible sonnets,” reveal strong tensions between his delight in the sensuous world and his urge to express it and his equally powerful sense of religious vocation.

Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins's Poems that first appeared in

About Poem:

God's Grandeur was written in February 1877, while Hopkins was studying at St. Beuno's College outside St. Asaph in North Wales.

This sonnet is a protest against the crass materialism of the age. Yet the poet says that everything is not lost. Till the time God continues to brood over it, there is hope for the world. God’s glory is going to burst out like the shine of the gold tinsel.

The title word grandeur, from the French, means greatness, grandness.

God's Grandeur is an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, being split into an octave (8 lines) and a sestet (6 lines). The octave and sestet are end rhymed and the rhyme scheme is: abbaabba cdcdcd. Traditionally the octave is a proposal or introduction, of an argument or idea, and the sestet then becomes the development of, or conclusion to, the octave. This shift in sense is known as the turn or volta (in Italian).

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.

Summary:

            The first four lines of the octave (the first eight-line stanza of an Italian sonnet) describe a natural world through which God’s presence runs like an electrical current, becoming momentarily visible in flashes like the refracted glintings of light produced by metal foil when rumpled or quickly moved. Alternatively, God’s presence is a rich oil, a kind of sap that wells up “to a greatness” when tapped with a certain kind of patient pressure. Given these clear, strong proofs of God’s presence in the world, the poet asks how it is that humans fail to heed (“reck”) His divine authority (“his rod”).

        The second quatrain within the octave describes the state of contemporary human life—the blind repetitiveness of human labor, and the sordidness and stain of “toil” and “trade.” The landscape in its natural state reflects God as its creator; but industry and the prioritization of the economic over the spiritual have transformed the landscape, and robbed humans of their sensitivity to the those few beauties of nature still left. The shoes people wear sever the physical connection between our feet and the earth they walk on, symbolizing an everincreasing spiritual alienation from nature.

        The sestet (the final six lines of the sonnet, enacting a turn or shift in argument) asserts that, in spite of the fallenness of Hopkins’s contemporary Victorian world, nature does not cease offering up its spiritual indices. Permeating the world is a deep “freshness” that testifies to the continual renewing power of God’s creation. This power of renewal is seen in the way morning always waits on the other side of dark night. The source of this constant regeneration is the grace of a God who “broods” over a seemingly lifeless world with the patient nurture of a mother hen. This final image is one of God guarding the potential of the world and containing within Himself the power and promise of rebirth. With the final exclamation (“ah! bright wings”) Hopkins suggests both an awed intuition of the beauty of God’s grace, and the joyful suddenness of a hatchling bird emerging out of God’s loving incubation. 

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