God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins
"God's Grandeur" is a Petrarchan sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins that illuminates the interplay between divine beauty and human corruption. The poem opens with the assertion that God has imbued the world with a magnificent grandeur, likening it to a powerful force that is palpable and ever-present. Hopkins reflects on humanity's failure to recognize and honor this divine influence, suggesting that people often prioritize the mundane over spiritual values, leading to environmental degradation. While the first part of the poem evokes a sense of despair regarding this tarnished state, the sestet provides a sense of hope, revealing that deeper beauty persists beneath the surface, undisturbed by human actions. Furthermore, the poet employs intricate sound patterns and innovative rhythms to enhance the emotional weight of his message, making use of alliteration and assonance to create a musical quality. Ultimately, despite the darkness humans create, the poem affirms the enduring presence of God’s grace, suggesting a promise of renewal and restoration. Written in 1877 but published posthumously in 1918, "God's Grandeur" exemplifies Hopkins's unique poetic style and his deep concern for the environment and spirituality.
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God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins
First published: 1918, in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Now First Published, with Notes by Robert Bridges
Type of poem: Sonnet
The Poem
“God’s Grandeur” is a Petrarchan sonnet describing a world infused by God with a beauty and power that withstands human corruption. The poem begins with the assertion that God has “charged” the world with grandeur. It then describes the implications of this “charge.” The grandeur is like a physical force, an electric current, a brightness that can be seen.
The poet questions the human response to this grandeur. Why do humans not “reck his rod?” That is, why do they not recognize and accept divine rule? Instead, humans have dirtied this world by using it for mundane purposes. The images work on both the literal and metaphorical level. The poem may be read both as a literal lament for the destruction of the environment by industry, and as a metaphorical lament that humans are more concerned with the prosaic and utilitarian than with spiritual values. In any event, the world seems tarnished, and humans seem insulated, unable to perceive the underlying beauty and grandeur.
The poem’s sestet dispels the gloom evoked in the first part. Even though humans are often insensitive to the glory of the world, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” The beauty and power of the world remains inviolable, intact. Though the night seems dark, there is a continuing restoration of the light and morning, because the presence of God, like the dove of peace, protects and restores the world.
Although Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote this poem in 1877, he did not seek to publish his poems; he entrusted them to his friend Robert Bridges. Bridges placed some of these poems in anthologies, but it was not until after the poet’s death, in 1918, that Bridges published a volume of his friend’s poetry.
Forms and Devices
Sonnets are fourteen-line poems built according to strict conventions in a tightly structured form. Hopkins was intrigued with the sonnet form and used it often, sometimes adding his own variations. His poem “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” is a modified sonnet with twenty-three lines.
“God’s Grandeur,” however, is written according to the conventions of the Petrarchan sonnet, named for the Italian writer Petrarch. This sonnet form has two parts, the initial eight lines, or the octave (rhymed abba, abba), and the concluding six lines, or sestet (which here uses the rhyme scheme cd, cd, cd). Typically, the Petrarchan sonnet poses a problem in the octave and presents a resolution in the sestet. Hopkins poses the problem of the human response to the beauty of nature, as created by God. The resolution comes through God’s grace, for divine concern preserves the beauty of the world intact despite human despoliation.
Hopkins studied Anglo-Saxon and Welsh poetry and drew from them an interest in alliteration, which he believed was essential to poetry. In “God’s Grandeur” the letter g is associated with God: “grandeur,” “greatness,” “gathers,” and “Ghost.” Each line of the poem is knit together through intricate sound patterns that include alliteration (repetition of consonants at the start of words), assonance (repetition of vowel sounds), and consonance (the recurrence of consonants within words). For example, the second and third lines read:
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
Notice how vowels (the long i of “shining” and “like”; the a of “flame” and “greatness”) and consonants (the repeated l, sh, f, m, n, s, and g) are echoed and re-echoed in the lines. Here and throughout the poem, words are repeated as well. In these lines, the simple words “it” and “like” recur. Elsewhere in the poem, words are repeated for emphasis: “have trod, have trod, have trod” suggests the repetitive, almost marchlike tread of generations of trudging people. The assonance of the vowels in “seared,” “bleared,” and “smeared” again drives home the ugliness of human destruction. The last line of the poem draws together in a complex pattern the consonants w, r, b, d, and s, which have echoed throughout the sestet and have come to carry the associations of the gentle, protecting warmth of God as a nesting dove. Further, the word “world” itself brings the reader back to the first line.
Alliteration may have had a philosophical meaning for Hopkins. He believed that the universe is built on the unity of God, which finds expression in the diversity of the natural world. Alliteration is a principle of showing the similarity of sounds in words of different meanings. Thus, alliteration becomes a poetic analogy of the unity underlying the diversity of the world.
Drawing again from the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh traditions, Hopkins made significant innovations in poetic rhythm. He was chiefly concerned with intensity, with capturing the essence of an image, idea, or action. To that end, he would often omit inessential words. Rather than using an even rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables, as in iambic pentameter, he was interested in the number of stressed syllables. He might omit unstressed syllables for effect or use extra unstressed syllables where they seemed useful. One may scan this poem by counting the number of stressed syllables in each line. These vary from five stresses in the first line to six in the last.