God's Grandeur GM Hopkins Poem analysis

God's Grandeur

• The poem celebrates God's greatness and energy that infuses the earth.
• The poet is in awe of God's power and dismayed by mankind's destruction and disregard of God's will.

Themes and Ideas

• God's power and greatness
• The significance of the natural world
• Criticism of mankind for disrespecting God and his work
• God's enduring love despite human failings

Poetic Style

• Euphonic alliteration and cacophony (unpleasant sound effects)
• Inscape: capturing the essence of the earth
• Instress: appreciating God's energy in the natural world
• Petrarchan Sonnet structure
• Straight-forward syntax and clear rhyme scheme
• Use of enjambment for effect

Analysis of Key Quotes

• "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" - displays the poet's love for God's greatness
• "like shining from shook foil" - simile makes God's energy more tangible and aesthetically pleasing
• "It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil" - simile captures God's force spreading through the earth
• "Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?" - caesura marks a shift in tone to dismay
• "Generations have trod, have trod, have trod" - repetition emphasizes Hopkins' dismay
• "And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil" - assonance is compelling and unpleasant
• "And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod" - vivid and unpleasant olfactory image, with metaphor of disconnection from nature
• "And for all this, nature is never spent" - volta marks a shift to gratitude
• "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things" - juxtaposes with humanity's sullying of the world
• "And though the last lights off the black West went / Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —" - powerful metaphor for God's pervading presence on earth
• "Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings" - representation of the Holy Spirit as a dove, encasing the earth with protective wings