God’s Grandeur

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Birds and Flight

Hopkins finds expressions of God throughout the natural landscape, but none more than when he writes about birds. Across Hopkins’s oeuvre, birds appear again and again, likely because of their significance in Christian iconography as symbols of the Holy Spirit. However, in Hopkins’s poems, birds find their significance, beauty, and perfection in their flight. For instance, Hopkins describes a falcon’s flight in “The Windhover”; in his descriptions, the poem’s speaker sees Christ manifested in the bird’s flight path. Although there is no direct mention of literal birds in “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins gestures towards one in the final couplet of the poem in his reference to the Holy Ghost. In the metaphor, Hopkins describes the Holy Ghost as a bird hovering over the world with “warm breast” and “ah! bright wings” (Line 14). For Hopkins, the beauty of birds and the natural world often reflect the beauty of Christ.

Fire and Electricity

Fire and electricity are recurring motifs throughout Hopkins’s oeuvre. In “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins uses fire and electricity to describe God’s glory and presence in the world. First, he describes the world as being “charged with the grandeur of God,” then as a fire “flaming out” into all things (Lines 1-2). As a symbol, fire and electricity underscore God’s presence because both connote passion and desire, even destruction and purification. In Hopkins’s poems, fire is used as metaphor to emphasize God’s imprint on the natural world, and how all living things are suffused with God’s spirit, an intense flame that permeates through the world. In his poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Hopkins uses the metaphors of “catching fire” and “drawing flame” to describe how God manifests in nature and in the particular behaviors of living things. For Hopkins, these moments of intense natural beauty are signs of God and Christ being present in the world.

Color

In many of his poems, Hopkins showcases his ability as a “word-painter,” rendering pictorial landscapes through language. For instance, in “The Windhover,” Hopkins paints a portrait of the falcon’s swift flight movement with a very specific color palette, describing it as “blue-bleak embers” and “gash gold-vermillion.” The specificity of color is characteristic across all of Hopkins’s poems. He does not content himself with simple descriptions of blue, purple, or yellow; he juxtaposes and yokes various adjectives together to create a new language of color. “Pied Beauty” is perhaps his best example of color, where he describes a world of “dappled things.” Skies are not simply blue, but “of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” Trout are covered in “rose-moles” and chestnuts falling from the trees are described as “fresh-firecoal.”

While “God’s Grandeur” isn’t his most “colorful” of poems, it still showcases his ability to paint in “grayscale.” In the final stanza, the speaker describes a sunset as “the last lights off the black West went” and later the morning as “the brown brink eastwards, springs” (Lines 11-12). Again, his descriptions of natural phenomena do not fall into simple categories of red or orange but find unique expressions in his coupling of adjectives. His descriptions of color in the natural world underscore the notion that nature is so brilliant a painter that it requires a new vocabulary to fully capture its magnificent colors.