Complete Text
The world is charged with the grandeur
of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared
with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:
the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West
went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright
wings.
Summary
The first four lines of the octave (the first eight-line
stanza of an Italian sonnet) describe a natural world through which
God’s presence runs like an electrical current, becoming momentarily
visible in flashes like the refracted glintings of light produced
by metal foil when rumpled or quickly moved. Alternatively, God’s presence
is a rich oil, a kind of sap that wells up “to a greatness” when
tapped with a certain kind of patient pressure. Given these clear,
strong proofs of God’s presence in the world, the poet asks how
it is that humans fail to heed (“reck”) His divine authority (“his
rod”).
The second quatrain within the octave describes the state
of contemporary human life—the blind repetitiveness of human labor,
and the sordidness and stain of “toil” and “trade.” The landscape
in its natural state reflects God as its creator; but industry and
the prioritization of the economic over the spiritual have transformed
the landscape, and robbed humans of their sensitivity to the those
few beauties of nature still left. The shoes people wear sever the
physical connection between our feet and the earth they walk on,
symbolizing an ever-increasing spiritual alienation from nature.
The sestet (the final six lines of the sonnet, enacting
a turn or shift in argument) asserts that, in spite of the fallenness
of Hopkins’s contemporary Victorian world, nature does not cease
offering up its spiritual indices. Permeating the world is a deep
“freshness” that testifies to the continual renewing power of God’s
creation. This power of renewal is seen in the way morning always
waits on the other side of dark night. The source of this constant
regeneration is the grace of a God who “broods” over a seemingly
lifeless world with the patient nurture of a mother hen. This final
image is one of God guarding the potential of the world and containing within
Himself the power and promise of rebirth. With the final exclamation
(“ah! bright wings”) Hopkins suggests both an awed intuition of
the beauty of God’s grace, and the joyful suddenness of a hatchling
bird emerging out of God’s loving incubation.
Form
This poem is an Italian sonnet—it contains fourteen lines
divided into an octave and a sestet, which are separated by a shift
in the argumentative direction of the poem. The meter here is not
the “sprung rhythm” for which Hopkins is so famous, but it does
vary somewhat from the iambic pentameter lines of the conventional sonnet.
For example, Hopkins follows stressed syllable with stressed syllable
in the fourth line of the poem, bolstering the urgency of his question:
“Why do men then now not reck his rod?” Similarly, in the next line, the
heavy, falling rhythm of “have trod, have trod, have trod,” coming
after the quick lilt of “generations,” recreates the sound of plodding
footsteps in striking onomatopoeia.
Commentary
The poem begins with the surprising metaphor of God’s
grandeur as an electric force. The figure suggests an undercurrent
that is not always seen, but which builds up a tension or pressure
that occasionally flashes out in ways that can be both brilliant
and dangerous. The optical effect of “shook foil” is one example
of this brilliancy. The image of the oil being pressed out of an
olive represents another kind of richness, where saturation and
built-up pressure eventually culminate in a salubrious overflow.
The image of electricity makes a subtle return in the fourth line,
where the “rod” of God’s punishing power calls to mind the lightning
rod in which excess electricity in the atmosphere will occasionally
“flame out.” Hopkins carefully chooses this complex of images to
link the secular and scientific to mystery, divinity, and religious
tradition. Electricity was an area of much scientific interest during
Hopkins’s day, and is an example of a phenomenon that had long been
taken as an indication of divine power but which was now explained
in naturalistic, rational terms. Hopkins is defiantly affirmative
in his assertion that God’s work is still to be seen in nature,
if men will only concern themselves to look. Refusing to ignore
the discoveries of modern science, he takes them as further evidence
of God’s grandeur rather than a challenge to it. Hopkins’s awe at
the optical effects of a piece of foil attributes revelatory power
to a man-made object; gold-leaf foil had also been used in recent
influential scientific experiments. The olive oil, on the other
hand, is an ancient sacramental substance, used for centuries for
food, medicine, lamplight, and religious purposes. This oil thus
traditionally appears in all aspects of life, much as God suffuses
all branches of the created universe. Moreover, the slowness of
its oozing contrasts with the quick electric flash; the method of
its extraction implies such spiritual qualities as patience and
faith. (By including this description Hopkins may have been implicitly
criticizing the violence and rapaciousness with which his contemporaries
drilled petroleum oil to fuel industry.) Thus both the images of
the foil and the olive oil bespeak an all-permeating divine presence
that reveals itself in intermittent flashes or droplets of brilliance.
Hopkins’s question in the fourth line focuses his readers
on the present historical moment; in considering why men are no
longer God-fearing, the emphasis is on “now.” The answer is a complex
one. The second quatrain contains an indictment of the way a culture’s
neglect of God translates into a neglect of the environment. But
it also suggests that the abuses of previous generations are partly
to blame; they have soiled and “seared” our world, further hindering
our ability to access the holy. Yet the sestet affirms that, in
spite of the interdependent deterioration of human beings and the
earth, God has not withdrawn from either. He possesses an infinite
power of renewal, to which the regenerative natural cycles testify.
The poem reflects Hopkins’s conviction that the physical world is
like a book written by God, in which the attentive person can always
detect signs of a benevolent authorship, and which can help mediate
human beings’ contemplation of this Author.
