Recommended
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (12)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
God’s grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins
- 1. God’s GrandeurGerard Manley Hopkins
- 2. The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
- 3. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
- 4. It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.
- 5. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
- 6. Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
- 7. And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
- 8. And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:
- 9. the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
- 10. And for all this, nature is never spent;
- 11. There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
- 12. And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
- 13. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Editor's Notes
- The world," according to the poem’s speaker is cared, protected and guarded by God.
- Simile- The speaker says world is temporary. One day the lights will go out, similar to the way the light appears and then goes out of "foil" when you shake it. -
- -We picture (abstractly) all the energy in the word rising to a great and fabulous peak. Then, naturally, this great gush will fall, collapse, or flatten out, "crushed" by gravity. -We smell the oil released from plants and other natural elements when they are "crushed" to make perfumes or soaps or incense. -But we also feel the world becoming "crushed" as we take too much oil from it, without replacing what we’ve taken.
- -The speaker reasons that since the natural world is fueled with God’s force, and we are here to take care of it, and since we only get one chance to do it, "why" don’t we "reck" or fear God’s anger? In other words, why don’t we take better care of the world around us?
- -The repetition of "trod“, makes the human journey through history sound desperate, and dull, and tiresome.
- -According to the speaker, trade pollutes everything. - Idea is If only the surface of the earth is calloused, and harmed, maybe the same is true of the people who have done the damage.
- -line is that we interfered too much with nature – we have stained it, but again, only on the surface. It "wears" our "smudge" like an unwanted outfit. -It’s not that humans inherently smell bad. Rather the point here is that too much of anything can become damaging.
- Nothing is growing in the dirt anymore. We live in a wasteland, alienated from that which we are supposed to treasure. We can’t even walk without shoes. We have lost the connection with nature, and our senses are dulled as a result.
- he natural world can "never" really be traded, not for money or anything else. Nature, as a work of God, is beyond all this.
- In nature, lines says, all the sweetest, cleanest, things are living. the speaker has now discovered that below the surface nature thrives.
- -Says, even though the sun sets in the west, and the night comes, morning always follows, with moving lights and fresh energy with the rising sun in the east. -the struggle to find light in the darkness of existence.
- -suggests that the world is in embryo, so to speak, yet to be completely born. -The shell of the egg connects with the idea of a hard surface coating the earth, hiding nature beneath it, -conclusion, this is seen in a more positive light. -the final lines state that daylight continues to follow night, "because" the Holy Ghost is hovering over the world, disturbed, but warm and benevolent. -Yet speaker 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. 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.