God’s Grandeur

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Nature as a Site of Religious Ecstasy

Hopkins’s poems feature landscapes that are at once secular observations of the world and outcries of religious devotion. This movement from the secular to the religious provides a key to understanding Hopkins’s poetry and how he so seamlessly moves from one register to the next.

While Hopkins writes poems that connect his religious beliefs to the things he sees in nature—like trees and birds and sunsets—he uses various techniques to draw the connection. For instance, his use of alliteration, consonance, assonance, and internal rhymes creates auditory and visual relations between disparate words to describe the behaviors of specific animals, as in “The Windhover” and “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” However, one feature he uses often is exclamatory statements and interjections—such as “ah,” “oh,” and “o.” These lyrical interjections indicate a moment in which the poem transitions from one mode of speech to another, as in the final utterance of “God’s Grandeur.”

While the final stanza of “God’s Grandeur” begins with a description of the natural world, the final three lines pivot to a religious mode of speech when he invokes the Holy Ghost as a bird hovering over the world with “ah, bright wings” (Line 14). In this final statement, the “ah” functions as an exhalation, a breathing out, or perhaps a cry of intense joy, indicating the poem’s speaker has experienced a moment of ecstasy or spiritual transcendence through his interaction with the natural world. In other words, Hopkins finds in nature a moment of divinity.

Humankind’s Impact on Nature

Ecopoetics is a tradition in poetry that came to be defined in the mid-20th century as a genre of poetry that explores nature, not as a site of beauty and pleasure, but as one that has been impacted by humans. Such poems aim to communicate concerns relating to ecology, such as deforestation, global warming, and environmental disaster. Ecopoetry differs from nature poems in its exploration of how humans have impacted the environment. While the term Ecopoetics had not been coined in the 19th century when Gerard Manley Hopkins was writing, Hopkins’s work can definitively be situated in this tradition.

In “God’s Grandeur,” there is a clear message of the damage that humankind has wrought on the world. The final quatrain (four-line stanza) of the first stanza highlights Hopkins’s disdain for society’s neglect of the natural world: “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod” (Line 5). He continues his critique of society’s impact on nature with his use of diction, using words like “smudge,” “smeared,” “bleared” (Lines 6-7), which connote ideas of humankind’s despoiling of the natural world. This is finally emphasized in the final line when the speaker refers to “the soil / [that] is bare now” and humankind’s inability to “feel” the earth beneath its feet (Lines 13-14). Hopkins locates this inability to “feel” the earth in the fact that humankind’s feet are “shod” (Line 14), a metonymy for the way civilization has separated humans from a true experience of nature.

What differentiates Hopkins from other Ecopoetry written in the 20th century is that Hopkins equates the destruction of the natural world to humankind’s lack of faith in God, evidenced when he asks the question: “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” (Line 5).

Inscape in Nature and God

Hopkins coined the term “inscape” to describe the internal essence, internal landscape, or nature of a thing, which is expressed through form and behavior. For Hopkins, each living thing has an identity that is unique and intrinsic to it, a design that is imbued with God’s magnificence. Hopkins believed that to show the inner landscape or inscape of a thing was to express God.

In Hopkins’s poems, there is often a distinction made between the inside and the outside to differentiate between a thing’s outward appearance, or its form, and its essence, or its spirit, which comes from God. His poem “As Kingfishers Draw Fire” is a preeminent example of his use of inscape, in which each thing Hopkins describes “Deals out that being indoors.” For instance, the speaker describes the flash of kingfishers (“catching fire”) and the quickness of dragonflies (“drawing flame”) and how “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same.” This idea of “one thing and the same” is central to Hopkins’s idea of inscape, in which individual things enact a specific identity through a unique form, but are also one and the same in their expression of God’s spirit. Essentially, for Hopkins, God is responsible for how each individual thing expresses its unique identity or “Deals out that being indoors.” Furthermore, recognizing an object’s unique inscape, according to Hopkins’s theory, can be its own religious experience, allowing him to experience God’s magnificence.

In “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins also thinks through some of these same theories about inscape. In the first four lines of the octet, Hopkins describes the “grandeur of God” as “[flaming] out, like shining from shook foil” (Lines 1-2). This is similar to the way in which Hopkins describes kingfishers and dragonflies in “As Kingfishers Draw Fire” as imbued with the passion of God but distinct in form. It also distinguishes between outside and inside, between the natural world and the divine spirit that gives the world its form, design, and vitality. This difference between inside and outside in his poems is crucial to understanding Hopkins’s theory of inscape.