96 PA RT O N E
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.Framing makes some but not all the difference, as in “Pied Beauty.” Beginning
and ending, God and the Holy Ghost embrace a threatened world.
This world is “charged,” like the word itself: stored with electric energy,
loaded, entrusted, assailed. To his friend Robert Bridges, Hopkins explained
“shining from shook foil” in a letter no less crackling with energy: “I mean
foil in its sense of leaf or tinsel.... Shaken goldfoil gives off broad glares like
sheet lightning and also, and this is true of nothing else, owing to its zigzag
dints and creasings and network of small many cornered facets, a sort of fork
lightning too.”
He sounds drunk on the tone, taste, texture of words, and the way they move.
An olive press stresses all ten syllables—“Crushed. Why do men then now not
reck his rod?”—and not for wordplay alone. Failure to heed divine will was
wasting his world, as Hopkins looked around him. In 1877, the year of “God ’s
Grandeur,” agricultural depression was setting in, farmhands leaving for the
city, technology breeding brutality, poverty, misery, and railways enmeshing
the land. Anglo-Saxon “trod,” overriding its rhyme word “God,” acts out this
wasting process, as does the grinding of “seared... bleared, smeared.”
Then by grace of a sonnet ’s form, the weighty eight-line octave gives way to
a sestet of fresh perception. After those industrially crowded monosyllables,
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,the breath turns limber for a promise, a blessing: “nature is never spent; / There
lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”
Now the prime example we humans have drawn from nature, night turning
to day, brings a spiritual lift. Out of blackness arises morning