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God's Grandeur Summary & Analysis
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

God's Grandeur Summary & Analysis
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “God's Grandeur”

1The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

2     It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

3     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

4Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

5Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

6     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

7     And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

8Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

9And for all this, nature is never spent;

10     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

11And though the last lights off the black West went

12     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

13Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

14     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

  • “God's Grandeur” Introduction

    • “God’s Grandeur” is a sonnet written by the English Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manly Hopkins. Hopkins wrote “God’s Grandeur” in 1877, but as with many of his poems, it wasn’t published until almost thirty years after his 1889 death. The word "grandeur" means grandness or magnificence. In "God's Grandeur" Hopkins conveys his reverence for the magnificence of God and nature, and his despair about the way that humanity has seemed to lose sight of the close connection between God and nature during the Second Industrial Revolution. Though the poem is a traditional 14-line sonnet, it's also an example of Hopkins’s characteristic use of unconventional poetic meters—though the meter of “God’s Grandeur” is actually more conventional than that of many of his other poems.

  • “God's Grandeur” Summary

    • The speaker describes a natural world through which God's presence runs like an electrical current, becoming momentarily visible in flame-like flashes that resemble the sparkling of metal foil when moved in the light. Alternately, the speaker describes God's presence as being like a rich oil (such as olive oil), whose true power or greatness is only revealed when crushed to its essence. Given this powerful undercurrent of evidence of God's presence in the world, the speaker asks, why do human beings not heed God’s divine authority? The speaker starts to answer his own question by describing the state of human life: the way that humanity over the generations has endlessly walked over the ground, and the way that industry and economic pursuits have damaged and corrupted the landscape such that it looks and smells only of men (and not of God). Not only has the land been stripped bare of the natural things that once lived upon it, but even the shoes that people now wear have cut off the physical connection between their feet and the earth they walk on.

      And yet, the speaker asserts, nature never loses its power, and deep down life always continues to exist. Though the sun will always fade into the darkness of night in the west, morning will always follow by springing up over the edge of the horizon in the east. The source of this constant cycle of regeneration is the grace of a God who guards the broken world much like a mother bird uses its body to watch over and keep warm its eggs and hatchlings.

  • “God's Grandeur” Themes

    • Theme God, Nature, and Man

      God, Nature, and Man

      The poem's very first line establishes the profound connection between God and nature that the speaker explores throughout "God's Grandeur." God is not connected to nature merely because God created nature. Rather, the speaker describes God as actively suffused within nature, as an ever-present "charge" running through it. Further, by describing God's grandeur as being something that will "flame out," or as being something as tangible as the oil that oozes from a crushed olive, the speaker makes an additional claim: that human beings can perceive, contemplate, or even interact with God through nature. The speaker reveres nature not only because it is a divine creation, but also because it is a direct conduit between humanity and God.

      The belief in such a deep link among God, nature, and humanity explains the speaker's despair about how humanity is ruining the natural world. In destroying nature ("sear[ing]", "smear[ing]", and "blear[ing]" it), humanity is destroying God's creation and severing its own connection to God. Even worse, humanity is not only destroying nature, but replacing the pristine sights, sounds, and smells of the natural world—and God's "charge" within it— with the "smudge" and "smell" of human beings.

      At the same time, nature's connection to God gives the speaker hope: because it is the creation of an omnipotent God who continues to watch over the world, nature can never be obscured or ruined by human beings. The natural cycles of life and death (implied by the references to sunset followed by sunrise), and the fact that God is still fulfilling his "charge" to protect nature (the way a mother bird "broods" over an egg), give the speaker confidence that nature will endure humanity's plundering and be reborn. Yet the speaker seems unsure about humanity's own place within nature's endless cycles: it's unclear if the speaker's vision of a reborn world includes humanity or not.

    • Theme Industry and Destruction

      Industry and Destruction

      Hopkins wrote "God's Grandeur" in 1877, in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution, which was a period of rapid technological advancement, including the expansion of factories, railroads, and electrical power. While the Second Industrial Revolution had many positive aspects, such as improving standards of living and loosening the social restrictions that blocked the lower classes from rising, it also had a brutal impact on nature: clear-cutting and mining for resources decimated the landscape; pollution from factories and trains darkened the air and water; and growing urbanization replaced countryside with cities and suburbs.

      In short, the rise of industry came at the expense of the natural world. In lines 5-8, the speaker of "God's Grandeur" laments the destruction of nature and the reckless way that humanity is engaging in this destruction. The repetition of "have trod" in line 5 captures the unceasing and almost mindless way that humanity has worn down the earth over countless generations. Hopkins's expressive—or even graphic—choice of the words "seared," "bleared," and "smeared" conveys Hopkins's disgust at how "all" has been corrupted and destroyed by humanity's relentless "trade" and "toil." The rise of industry has caused nature, once pristine and free of the unnatural stains of mankind, to be marred by "man's smudge" and "man's smell."

      Finally, in line 8, the speaker notes how the blind pursuit of economic growth has made humanity unable to even recognize the destruction that the rise of industry has left in its wake. The earth has been laid bare by industrial development, but people can no longer even feel the ground beneath their feet because they are wearing shoes that symbolize the mass production of the industrial world. In "God's Grandeur," the speaker describes a double tragedy: how humanity destroyed nature and its connection to God, and how the destruction is so complete that humanity can't even recognize what it has lost.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “God's Grandeur”

    • Line 1

      The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

      The first line of “God’s Grandeur” establishes the poem's main theme as well as several stylistic characteristics of the poem. The line, a single declarative sentence, uses a metaphor to compare “the grandeur of God” to an electric force that “charges”—that is, that suffuses and animates—the world. This idea, of God being both a force that powers nature and an essence found throughout nature, is a fundamental concept that pervades the rest of the poem.

      The word “charge” also carries a second, less common, meaning that is important to understand. A “charge” can also be an obligation. For instance, a mail carrier is "charged" with delivering the mail; a military general is "charged" with leading troops in battle. Applying this second meaning of “charged” to the first line of "God's Grandeur" evokes the implication that the world has a responsibility to recognize the magnificence of God—and lines 4-8 of the poem describe the way that humanity has failed in this responsibility.

      The meter of the first line is also worth noting. “God’s Grandeur” is a sonnet, and all sonnets are usually written in iambic pentameter—a poetic meter in which five iambs are written one after another to produce ten-syllable-long lines that follow a consistent pattern of unstressed-stressed syllables. However, while the first line of “God’s Grandeur” starts with four syllables of iambic pentameter, it then goes a bit off the rails:

      The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

      Technically speaking, this line, rather than being made up of five iambs, is made up of two iambs followed by two anapests (which have an unstressed-unstressed-stressed pattern). This unconventional shift in meter creates a few notable effects:

      • It signals that the rest of the sonnet will also likely play with and subvert the norms of a standard sonnet's poetic meter, which it does.
      • It adds an extra "charge" to the stressed words in the line by reducing the number of stressed words in it from the traditional five of iambic pentameter to just four. Because the line contains fewer stressed words, those that are stressed get even more emphasis. This subtle unexpected "charge" makes the meter of the first line seem to embody and amplify the meaning of the poem's opening sentence.

    • Lines 2-4

       It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
           It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
      Crushed.

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    • Line 4

      Why do men then now not reck his rod?

    • Lines 5-6

      Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
           And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    • Lines 7-8

       And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
      Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

    • Lines 9-10

      And for all this, nature is never spent;
           There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

    • Lines 11-12

      And though the last lights off the black West went
           Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

    • Lines 13-14

      Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
           World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

  • “God's Grandeur” Symbols

    • Symbol Feet

      Feet

      A foot is the surface through which people literally stand on and touch the earth. As such, in "God's Grandeur" feet symbolize humanity’s interaction with nature—an interaction that can involve connection, but also, like a foot stepping on a flower, destruction.

      Feet are implicitly referenced in the poem in line 5, in the words: “have trod.” By talking about how man has walked across the earth without mentioning feet explicitly, the poem creates a kind of absence of feet, which captures the way that humanity walks across the earth without connecting to it, and instead wears nature down with constant “trodding.” The repetition of "have trod" further emphasizes the mindless, unfeeling way that people are moving across the land.

      The poem then makes this point explicit in line 8, noting how humanity’s feet can’t even feel the destruction they have caused to nature ( a destruction marked by “bare” soil), because those feet are in shoes (“being shod”). The poem uses feet, then, as a symbol of humanity’s capacity to touch and connect with nature—a capacity that has been blocked by the industry that humanity now pursues.

      Additionally, the word "foot" has a second meaning that hints at the role of art and poetry in this ongoing conflict. In poetic terms, a "foot" refers to a pair of two iambs, so "feet" are crucial for building a poem's meter. By noting that even a "foot" cannot feel, the speaker seems to express doubt that even a poem like this one can do much to increase people's sensitivity toward God and nature. But note that the speaker has written the poem despite this doubt, which suggests a hope that "feet" do have some potential to create feeling, even in a largely unfeeling world.

    • Symbol Sunrise and Sunset

      Sunrise and Sunset

      Toward the end of the poem, the speaker introduces the symbol of sunrise and sunset to represent the never-ending cycle of nature's power. While lines 9 and 10 introduce the idea that nature (and "God's Grandeur") can never truly be destroyed, this new symbol in lines 11 and 12 shows the reader exactly what this "dearest freshness" might look like. These two lines dramatize the world's journey into darkness each night and the sun's joyful return each morning, suggesting that even when the world looks bleak (as it speaker describes it in lines 5 through 8), light will always return in the form of God's presence "charged" through the natural world.

  • “God's Grandeur” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Enjambment

      Enjambment occurs in four places in “God’s Grandeur"—at the ends of lines 3, 7, 11, and 13. In each case, Hopkins uses enjambment, sometimes in conjunction with caesura, to play with the rhythm of the poem in order to emphasize certain words, or even to create a reading experience that mirrors what is being described in the poem.

      At the end of lines 3 and 7, the poem couples enjambment with caesura to create a dramatic effect. In line 3, the reader speeds through the end of the line to follow the meaning of the sentence, only to have to suddenly stop at the first word of line 4, “Crushed.” Just as the poem is here describing an olive being crushed into oil, the reader has been "crushed" by being forced to stop reading after the first word of line 4. The speaker then uses almost the opposite effect in line 7 by using a caesura near the end of the line to precede an enjambment leading into line 8. This puts great emphasis on “the soil,” which in turn heightens the sense of despair over the fact, revealed in the next line, that humanity’s recklessness has stripped that soil bare.

      In line 11, the enjambment at the end of a sentence about a sunset causes the line to continue right into the next line about a subsequent sunrise, emphasizing the connection between sunrise and sunset, which together represent the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. The enjambment in line 13, meanwhile, puts focus on both the word “bent” and the word “world,” which can be read as emphasizing the brokenness of the world as well as the way that God ("the Holy Ghost") nurtures that broken world to create new life. Throughout “God’s Grandeur,” enjambment creates emphasis and rhythm that hones and supports the meaning of the poem's language.

    • Alliteration

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    • Caesura

    • Epizeuxis

    • Metaphor

    • Metonymy

    • Polysyndeton

    • Rhetorical Question

    • Simile

  • “God's Grandeur” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Charged
    • Grandeur
    • Reck
    • Rod
    • Trod
    • Trade
    • Bleared
    • Toil
    • Foot
    • Shod
    • Spent
    • Brink
    • Bent
    • Broods
    Charged

    • In the poem, the word "charged" primarily refers to the force stored within something. In the poem, the speaker states that the natural world contains and is animated by the "force" of the "grandeur of God."

      The word "charge" also has a less commonly used secondary meaning that, it can be argued, also relates to the poem. In this secondary meaning, a "charge" refers to an obligation or requirement. The implication in this meaning is that the world has an obligation to respect the "grandeur of God"—an obligation that the poem will go on to show has not been met by humanity.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “God's Grandeur”

    • Form

      “God’s Grandeur” is an Italian sonnet (also called a Petrarchan Sonnet). Italian sonnets such as this one consist of 14 total lines. And as is typical of an Italian sonnet, the poem begins with an eight-line stanza called an octave, which is itself made up of two four-line quatrains, and ends with a six-line stanza called a sestet, which is made up of two three-line tercets:

      • Octave
        • Quatrain
        • Quatrain
      • Sestet
        • Tercet
        • Tercet

      “God’s Grandeur” also follows the pattern of an Italian sonnet in that its octave sets out what's called a “proposition,” which establishes a problem. The sestet then begins with what is called a “turn,” which marks a shift in the poem’s focus from presenting a problem to resolving that problem.

      In a typical Italian sonnet the problem is often something like unrequited love. In “God’s Grandeur” the problem presented is a bit bigger: that humanity has destroyed much of nature and, in the process, lost the ability to sense God’s “charge” in nature.

    • Meter

      While “God’s Grandeur” follows the form of an Italian sonnet, there is one aspect in which it differs. Italian sonnets written in English almost always use the meter iambic pentameter. And, in fact, “God’s Grandeur” does contain many lines of iambic pentameter. Yet, at the same time, the poem often doesn’t use iambic pentameter, instead using less regular or structured meters. For instance, the poem’s eleventh line contains the five unstressed-stressed pairs of syllables that mark iambic pentameter:

      And though the last lights off the black West went

      But the poem’s first line follows a quite different pattern:

      The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

      In addition, even when the poem uses iambic pentameter in the poem, it often subverts the rhythm created by the meter. It does this particularly in the first octave of the poem, as in the second line:

      It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

      In that line, the meter is iambic pentameter, but the comma creates a pause that interrupts the meter’s rhythm. In the poem, then, the speaker is both creating the rhythm of iambic pentameter and layering other rhythms against it, similar to the concept of counterpoint in music. It is interesting that the speaker uses this technique more in the octave, when the poem is following the traditional Italian sonnet practice of laying out the problem, than it does in the sestet when the poem offers a resolution. Put another way: the poem's flow is more interrupted in the part where it presents a distressing problem than it is in the part that offers a more hopeful solution.

      Overall, the poem’s meter could be described as mostly iambic pentameter with a bit of a different meter, called sprung rhythm, mixed in. Hopkins himself actually invented sprung rhythm, and explanations of sprung rhythm can get quite technical. At the big picture level what’s important to understand is that sprung rhythm has more varied stresses and patterns than other traditional meters (and is a precursor to modern free verse). Hopkins used looser and more varied meter because he felt that it was critical for poetry to capture the more complex and varied rhythms of common speech. As Hopkins put it, “Poetical language should be the current language heightened.” In “God’s Grandeur” specifically, he subverts the general flow of iambic pentameter in the poem also to emphasize specific words and ideas, and, perhaps, to embody in the stuttering rhythm of the poem the way that he describes humanity as interfering with the flow of nature and God’s “charge.”

    • Rhyme Scheme

      One area in which “God’s Grandeur” precisely follows the conventions of an Italian sonnet is in its rhyme scheme. The poem follows a standard Italian sonnet rhyme scheme of:

      ABBAABBA CDCDCD

      It is worth noting that even as the poem follows this traditional rhyme scheme, it also uses various techniques—such as caesura, enjambment, and instances of internal rhyme, such as the repeated long "e" sounds in line 6—to sometimes draw attention away from the rhyme scheme.

      Just as he plays with and subverts the rhythm of the traditional iambic meter of a sonnet, Hopkins plays with and subverts the rhythm that would normally be established by following a regular rhyme scheme. By breaking this expected flow, Hopkins is able to sometimes focus intense pressure on individual words or phrases (“crushed”; “the soil”), and to layer multiple rhythms over and against each other in a way that mirrors the layered complexity and antagonisms of the world of man, God, and nature that the poem describes.

  • “God's Grandeur” Speaker

    • The speaker of “God’s Grandeur” is anonymous and genderless. While it’s possible to argue that Hopkins himself is the speaker, there isn’t definitive evidence in the poem that this is the case. Regardless, the speaker is suffering. This suffering stems from what the speaker experiences as a disconnect: his or her own profound sense of the connection between nature and God—that God, essentially, can be experienced through nature—in contrast to the way that the rest of humanity not only don’t seem to feel that connection but is in fact heedlessly destroying nature. The speaker’s despair about what humanity has done is so powerful that, in lines 7-8, the speaker might even be described as being misanthropic (a hater of humankind).

      In the second stanza, the speaker’s suffering eases as he or she realizes that, despite humanity’s destruction of nature, nature (and God) is too strong and will endure and, like a rising sun, re-emerge. The poem never makes clear, though, whether the speaker’s misanthropy eases along with his or her torment. After all, when the speaker describes the renewed world through the metaphor of God as a kind of mother bird and the broken world as an egg from which a new future will emerge, humanity is unmentioned. While the speaker’s faith in God and nature is clear, whether humanity is a part of the speaker’s vision of a renewed world is up for debate.

  • “God's Grandeur” Setting

    • The setting of "God’s Grandeur" is, to put it broadly, the Earth. While the poem could be seen as being specifically set in the time period of the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century, when it was written, it can describe any time in which nature is under threat and mankind seems disconnected from God.

      The poem also looks deeper into nature (some might argue it even looks underground, though that’s probably too literal a reading) in order to capture the way that nature endures, tended by God, always ready to spring forth again.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “God's Grandeur”

      Literary Context

      Hopkins wrote "God's Grandeur" in 1877, at around the same time as he wrote a number of sonnets, including "Spring" (1877), "In the Valley of the Elwy" (1877), and "The Sea and the Skylark" (1877). All of these poems share similar characteristics, both thematically and stylistically. Thematically, they focus on nature and God—on Hopkins's sense that God is suffused and accessible through nature—and his resulting concern about the destruction of nature by people and the forces of industrialization. Stylistically, "God's Grandeur" contains some of the metrical complexity often found in Hopkins's work— including examples of Hopkins's own invented meter of sprung rhythm— though "God's Grandeur" is perhaps a bit less extreme in its metrical experimentation than other Hopkins poems are.

      In some ways, Hopkins's poetry is of his time. His concerns about the dirtiness and corruption of industrialization are also evident in the work of other Victorian poets such as Christina Rossetti and Alfred Lord Tennyson, as well as in the work of fiction writers like Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. But in other ways, Hopkins's poetry, including "God's Grandeur," seems to both anticipate the future and connect to the deeper past. Hopkins's style, with its meter loosed from the strict rhythms of the Romantic poets of the early 19th century or of most other Victorian poets, is often seen as anticipating the rise of free verse in the early 20th century. Meanwhile, Hopkins's sense of the connection between God and nature—so powerfully evoked in "God's Grandeur"—is more reminiscent of the work of George Herbert (1593-1633) and other Metaphysical poets than it is of most of his Victorian contemporaries (though certainly some poets of Hopkins's time, including Christina Rossetti, shared Hopkins's religious concerns).

      Historical Context

      In 1877, England was in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution, a period of rapid technological advancement in both manufacturing and transportation that was dramatically transforming English society. Most crucial for Hopkins, the Second Industrial Revolution led to widespread degradation of nature from the exploitative mining and harvesting of natural resources, pollution emitted by factories, and the expansion of urban and suburban spaces into what was formerly wilderness.

      Many artists and writers (and people from all walks of life) viewed this destruction of nature with alarm and despair. For Hopkins, who saw nature as an expression of God, the impact of industrialization on nature was particularly painful. This impact certainly helped shape his misanthropic sense— expressed at times in "God's Grandeur"—that, in comparison to nature, mankind is, as Hopkins once put it, "backward."

  • More “God's Grandeur” Resources

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