Today’s Poem: God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins on the goodness “deep down things”

Johann Michael Rottmayr (1656–1730), fresco of the Holy Spirit as a dove, Karlskirche, Vienna, Austria (Wikimedia Commons)

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God’s Grandeur

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

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Like “The Windhover,” which appeared at Poems Ancient and Modern this past February, the Petrarchan sonnet, “God’s Grandeur,” was written in 1877 by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). With “The Windhover” and other poems of that same prolific year, “God’s Grandeur” represents Hopkins’s resumption of a part of himself he had clearly felt impelled to put away. Whether he had, actually, an ascetic bent, or whether he felt, toward the end of a very social undergraduate career (1863–1867) at Balliol College, Oxford, that he ought to have an ascetic bent, we can follow the timeline of this process of self-renunciation.

In November 1865, he notes in his diary that he has “resolved to give up all beauty,” until he has God’s “leave” to resume it. What this means is at first unclear. How does one “give up all beauty?” “The Habit of Perfection,” a poem written in January 1866, seeks to answer that question by proposing that the physical senses simply stop channeling earthly experience. Hopkins’s next move, at the start of Lent that year, is to give up poetry entirely, at least for that penitential season. By July he has resolved to become a Roman Catholic, a move that will estrange him from family and old friends and close doors of opportunity that would otherwise have opened at his touch. In October, John Henry Newman, the chief Oxford convert, receives Hopkins into the Catholic Church. In 1868, resolved to join the Jesuits, Hopkins makes a bonfire of his poems and vows to write no more, in order to devote himself entirely to religion. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins (Wikimedia Commons)

The problem, of course, is that religion necessarily happens in this embodied life. It is practiced not by the emptied-out shell of a person, but by the whole person, as he is, with all his inescapable faults and all his inescapable gifts. There is a tradition of asceticism in Christianity, to be sure, but as with any essentially positive charism, the ascetical impulse can tip over into something destructive: a gnostic denial of the possibility for goodness in the physical body and the material world. A faith so lived can become, all too easily, not a way of joy but a soul-stunting. 

As readers, we may be grateful that in 1872 Hopkins began reading the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus, with his insistence on the “univocality” of being. Hopkins came to see that the theological mind and the poetic imagination might not only coexist, but actively nourish each other — that, after all, the poet’s inevitable focus on the finite particulars of this world did not close off the theologian’s seeking after an infinite God. Everything we know of Hopkins, from his determination to convert in the first place, to his obedient suffering under the uncongenial conditions of his life as a Jesuit, tells us that he would never have resumed writing poetry simply because not writing was hard. But where so many doors had closed upon him, Duns Scotus opened for him the one that really mattered. 

Today’s Poem, then, is part of a second flowering of poetry for Hopkins. His life might be said to have re-begun in 1875, the year he composed “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” But it is these famous sonnets of 1877 that assert not only the goodness of the created world, but the goodness of his personal vocation, to bear witness in the electric language of his lines to that larger goodness. As always in Hopkins’s verse, many of the pentameter lines, particularly in the octet, feel over-crammed with syllables and bursting at their own seams, all energy, like the teeming, struggling, fallen but beloved creation itself. Then the turn into the sestet comes like a sigh of relief, with less-crowded lines, fewer commas, a perfectly straightforward iambic-pentameter assertion: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” And over the world, “bent” but good, broods the Holy Ghost with that “warm breast,” those “ah! bright wings.” 

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