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Let’s read a Public Domain Poem 1 [1]

['The Geogre', 'Thom Hartmann', 'Chitown Kev', 'Belinda Ridgewood', 'Bill In Portland Maine']

Date: 2026-08-25  

I don’t know any precedent for this sort of story at Daily Kos, but as an English Literature professor who was retired, I think some of the old poems folks might have hit in a sophomore survey deserve a bit more leisure and care than they may have gotten in a breathless “From Milton to Post-Modernism in Fifteen Weeks” class. I’d like to start with a poem that keeps coming back to me when discussing all sorts of things, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur.”

[Preface] Gerard Manley Hopkins was, indeed, a Jesuit, although the Society of Jesus did not think he was terribly good as an employee. (There is an essay in Immortal Diamond from a superior in the order explaining that they were not unjust in sending him to an impoverished place and giving him a low position. Not their fault.) To some degree, it might not have been just the Jesuits who were blind to the talent of Hopkins. He had only one published poem that got any notice, and yet, working alone, far from literary society, he came up with a new prosody (pattern of syllabic stress/rhythm) for English verse (and I’m not going to say a word about it, because it’s a distraction for us) and, I would argue, completely reconsidered assonance, half-rhyme, rhyme, and, especially, alliteration.

Before I throw the poem at you, I have one requirement, not request. Read the poem aloud. If you do not, you will miss more than just pretty sounds. Additionally, obey the syntax, not the line breaks. Hopkins uses enjambment quite frequently as a way of controlling the speed of the poem/reader so as to recreate a particular emotional or spiritual state that the poet is experiencing. [Consider what is only part of the first three lines of his “The Windhover” without line breaks: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin; <pause> dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air.” It is impossible to read it except in one or two breaths, and that’s on purpose.] Line breaks are usually present for the purpose of highlighting the terminal word or emphasizing rhyme or assonance.

[Text]

God’s Grandeur (1877 / 1918)

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.

[And?] The 1870’s, on the Continent and in British arts, was dominated by a search for “more,” for meaning in addition to prime industrialism, colonialism, and empire. In 1857, Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal starts French Symbolist poetry, but, by the time the Anglo-American Modern poets would tap into Arthur Symonds, the Symbolists had cooked up a full metaphysics. The apparent world lay atop another — one of connected items that made for a single meaning, a symbol — just as the Grail is not a cup, not an artifact, not a quest, but much more all connected. These second-level or hidden ideas might point at something completely unlike the “vehicle” that is pointing. Shortly after the 1870’s, there would be Freud and the subconscious — the “iceberg” of which the conscious mind is merely the bit above the surface. The Theosophists and their revival of arcana, the Spiritualist movement. . . all were begun or beginning in the time.

I mention this because Hopkins offers his own piercing of the corrupting, corrupt, and decadent world with an exuberant, and defiant, assertion of something a bit more than the orthodox notion of the glory of God reflected by creation. In Psalms, “day speaks to night” across the world of the glory of God, so that pagans and heathens alike would see the beauty and scope of the world and be stricken with the power of the Creator, even if they did not (and could not, as they were not Chosen) know His name.

The orthodox Christian view of the Fall is that God created a perfect world, and its center was Eden (the peaceable kingdom in Isaiah 11 is the redeemed world). When man fell, the very nature of humanity and all of creation fell from perfection. Now, what does “from perfection” entail? Well, that’s the subject of debate, but nature is no longer Edenic: insects bite, animals devour each other, death is a universal sentence, but, as the Christian humanists would say, the beauty remains, and that beauty testifies to God’s glory (good fame). The various Christian leaders emphasize either the majesty and beauty of nature or the folly and transience of anything other than pursuit of “perfection.”

I go over this, because Hopkins’s answer is beyond even the the Christian humanists, who were mainly from the established churches (and some of the very, very early counter-Reformation). Most of the Protestant churches after Calvin concentrated on the “utter depravity” of man after the fall and man’s “dominion” over nature. That view, which is back en vogue, says that nature exists to be of use.

Hopkins, though, goes beyond arguing for the glory of God in creation by saying that nature emanates God’s beauty, strength, love, and ongoing creation. The natural world is not some puzzle by a clock-maker God, but the dynamic of an eternal spiritual and physical statement.

[Readings] 1. The poem is a sonnet. That means that it is in 14 lines. Most of us are familiar with the Shakespearean sonnet, which poses a problem in the octave, answers it in the quatrain following the octave, and then has a volta or “turn” with a summary, reversal, or aphorism in the last couplet. This ain’t a Shakespearean sonnet. It is more Spenserian. The octave presents a problem, and the sestet answers. However, the last two lines do, of course, intensify the answer and give the most abstract and literally ecstatic form of the answer to the problem of human existence in a created world (it is ever-created).

As such, the rhyme scheme is abba, abba, cdcdcd. Poets before 1950 certainly expected readers to hear the rhyme and to know that rhyming lines were meant to be together in sense. Therefore, Hopkins tells us that the first 8 lines are the same thing with two phases, and the last six, including the turn, is another.

2. I will discuss the octave (1-8), then the sestet (9-14).

Octave: Pay attention to the rhyming words. Poets through the 19th century would imply that words which rhyme had a hidden (symbolic, emotional, or essential) relationship — that there was more than a phonetic similarity. Thus, we get God + rod, foil + oil, trod + shod, and toil + soil. See what I mean? The most popular poem in the world is the King James translation of Psalm 23, where we get “thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me,” so we know that God’s rod is his shepherd’s club. It is a weapon. Otherwise, “shod” is a perfectly normal strong verb past tense of “to shoe.” If you put shoes on a horse, it is “shod.” If something treads, then when it passes, it has “trod” (perhaps the “well trodden path”). And, from Genesis (3:19) and the description of the Fall from Eden we know that it is by the sweat of our brows that the soil will be tilled and give us bread.

As for “oil” and “foil,” I don’t want to say much. I am sick to death of explications of “ooze of oil” and “shook foil.” I have never felt as if the images needed particular explication, especially when so many critics want to dig up some biographical detail to make the oil of some sort and the foil of a particular type. They want us to not think of Reynolds Wrap and Mercury. I, on the other hand, don’t think it matters if we do.

I.A. Richards, in Principles of Practical Criticism, said that the first thing, upon reading a poem, is to make out the plain sense of the words, then to create a paraphrase. The next step is to look for the musicality of the arrangement — the soundscape, the rhythm, the abutment of consonants. After that, and lastly, consider imagery, theme, and symbol. Following the greatest pragmatist of literary criticism, therefore:

1-4: The world carries God’s grandeur as a (galvanic or magnetic) charge. That grandeur fires out in an eruption the same way that the quality of shining does from shaken foil, and/but it also gathers to great size or great power like oil that has been crushed. Why, therefore, don’t men think about his power?

The second quatrain continues this questioning of the abstract quality of “grandeur” being an emanating quality of all creation and why we don’t notice either it or to whom it belongs.

5-8: Generations have stamped it down, and everything is burned by buying and selling — made indistinct, polluted by human work, and everything now wears that human soot/smudge and has the smell of man covering it. The soil is barren now, and our feet cannot feel the earth in their shoes.

Sestet: Again, the rhyme words will tell of a synonmity, a rhyme in meaning: spent + went -> bent, things + springs -> wings. These rhymes, stated in reverse, are the whole “message” of the answer to the persistence of God’s love and grandeur.

Paraphrase: And yet for all of this ignorance and human stain, nature is never finished or expended. Within nature the most precious freshness, the deep down things, lives, and even though the last lights set over the darkest west, morning springs up at the brink of the earth because the Holy Ghost broods over this bent world with a warm breast and, see! bright wings.

Some gloss is necessary here, because this is where it isn’t simple to explain the “plain sense.” Hopkins piles adjectives together without prepositions, uses allusions from poetry, from medieval/Classical myth, and finally makes a reference to a physical phenomenon without explanation. The “spent” of line 9 is a reference to the prior “trade” and “toil” that obscure the natural world and more specifically refers to “consumed.” As such, the poem is not referring to a specific item, but the more abstract “Nature,” which cannot be exhausted, even in a field of ash. It is in this nature that the dearest freshness (of?) (in?) deep down things lives. Lines 9-10 refer to a replenishing essence of nature, an endlessly refilling cup, but not of items or specific iterations of phenomena.

From there, Hopkins takes the pessimism of the octave to its most extreme place — the desolation of the whole world, the end of civilization, or simply death. “The West” is a traditional mythological reference to “the place of the dead” in ancient Welsh and Irish literature, and for obvious reasons. As with the translatio stultitia (the “march of stupidity and ignorance,” which is the obverse of translatio studii — the “progress of learning”), the sun sets in the west and darkness takes the land. However, line 11 is also quite literal and physical: although the last star, with the moon, has set in the west, but that only means that the eastern horizon (line 12) will be brown. The “spring” of morning is both the generative spring of the season and the kinetic leap of a sunrise.

I want to come back to line 13 and address line 14. In the last line, the holy spirit is figuratively a bird, but the earth is a nest which the Spirit broods over. This is a recollection of the King James description of the creation, when the spirit of the Lord “brooded” upon the waters. Hopkins takes the 17th century v. “brood” (meditate, harbor) and transmutes it into the 19th century naturalist’s “brood” (harbor, tend to a nest, suckle young). The breast of the holy spirit is warm against the cold of a dark night, but the final two words — “bright wings” — is a very specific reference to sunrise. Just before the sun comes over the horizon, light can appear in two parabola arching up from the just-emerging sun. These appear to the poet as wings belonging to the image of the brooding Holy Ghost.

It is because, per line 13, the world is “bent” in sin/error/incompleteness that it goes into the dark, but it is also because it is bent that the sun must rise as the stars and moon’s light vanishes. Nature is never spent. It is also because the world is bent that it is — looking at an open horizon — like the circle of a nest being tended by the loving spirit which shows bright wings.

Musical effects: There are many. What I would like to draw attention to is the way that Hopkins creates intentional ambiguity with juxtaposition, and how these juxtapositions create unique phonetic effects. “Dearest freshness Deep Down things” is both a stacking of words that creates what critic Tzvetan Todorov called “vertical” meaning (separate meanings that sit atop each other without making, or allowing, the reader to choose one) and a wonderful beat of alliteration. Hopkins uses alliteration like rhyme. Alliterative words and phrases are not similar in meaning, but, rather, combining and repeating meaning. Line 14’s “world with warm wings // broods breast bright” illustrates this.

Additionally, there is the prosody. I told you I would not say the words “sprung rhythm,” and, other than that, I won’t. Just read the poem aloud and put your hand under your chin. Every time your chin goes down, that’s a syllabic stress. I’ll bet you’re not see-sawing between syllables, but you are in a pattern.

There is a whole lot more to say about this.

Why I keep thinking about the poem: The combination of condemnation and hope appeals to me. This poem recognizes the decay of human folly, but it insists that, in spite of it, there is love under, and over, the world. Yes, there is reck(oning) His rod, but there is also the warmth of the breast, the joy of the grandeur in the bright wings.

[Conclusion] Again, I doubt there is much of an audience for something this pedantic, but it’s fine if people want to correct or add to it. I hope that the anti-theist comments can hold their fingers. I’m only talking about a poem, here, and it is, indisputably, a great one.

This is an incomplete thing — my discussion. I did my little all in a half a day, and I hope folks do pitch in to make it larger. If there is interest, I’d at least like to know what groups to post such things to. Not very political, but the political only takes place within the context of living, educated, and aware people.

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