God's Grandeur
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.
My chief interest in this poem is Hopkin’s movement from irony to earnestness—or at least, what I read as such. I’ve played around with reading the entire thing as earnest and the entire thing as ironic, but for me the text sustains neither reading in its whole and instead communicates a sudden movement from one to the other.
There is a duplicity to the word “charged” in the first line. For my first many readings of the poem, this word meant for me the same thing it means for a battery to be charged: filled with pulsating energy. But the more I sat with the following lines, the more I realized the possibility of an ironic reading—that the world has been charged with God’s grandeur the same way a thief may be charged with robbery in a court of law. Whatever meaning you ascribe to that first word completely changes the mood and tenor of the poem: the electric charge of the world fills the reader with awe, but legal charges fill me with bitterness and ire.
I see no possibility beyond irony in the second two lines. “It will flame out” and “It gathers to a greatness” invoke the seriousness of scripture, but the appended similes are surprising. When I hear “the shining of shook foil,” I see in my mind the image of my uncle and his sons carrying metal sheets back behind the barn, and I wonder what other possible connotations “shook foil” could have beyond the glimmer of light reflecting on construction materials. When I read “like the ooze of oil,” something in me recoils, and I see gross barrels oozing at their seams. How could the charge be electric when the similes themselves are seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil?
And then the timpani beat at the broken line: Crushed. Grammatically, this is describing the oil, isn’t it? As if something is crushing barrels causing the oil to leak? Its place at the beginning of the line, though, brings it to the fore as a meta-comment on the poem thus far, and to my ear it does the same when I read it aloud. My own hopes that the world be charged with the electricity of God’s grandeur stand crushed when I try to understand the supernatural by means of such mundane and mucky metaphors. When I reach this word, I reread the first few lines of the poem and see “charged” as a legal term and “crushed” as what happens to promises like “it will flame out” and “gather to a greatness” when viewed in terms of the similes provided.
Upon reflection on lessons learned in my churchy youth, the oil metaphor, though initially material, does seem to point to something more divine. Oil is crushed from the olive in the press, and prior to his crucifixion, Christ bled from every pore in the olive garden of Gethsemane (a name that means “olive press.”) Though it may be ironic to say that God’s grandeur gather’s to a greatness in the ooze of man-made oil, and though all our hopes may be crushed by our toiling world, and though God himself may stand on trial for the world he has created, yet redemption oozes at the olive press through the torment of Christ’s atonement and intimations of the final earnestness of Hopkins theology withstand the battering winds of his doubts and live there, embedded beneath the irony in a turn that feels transcendent.
But I hold that to be a mere suggestion, food for thought, not overtly present in the voice I hear when I chant the text to myself in my mind, because the intensity of Crushed speaks far more to the pain of doubt than to an epiphany of transcendence, and it’s followed by what must be the ironic highlight of the poem, a question to which both the preceding and following lines stand as answer. Why do men then now not reck his rod? I read this as seven concatenated drum beats of stress before the release of the final iamb, his rod. The tension is incredible. It makes this line one that you can keep in your mouth for hours, like a potent lozenge that refuses to finish its flavor. This question can be read in two ways: “Why, then, do men, after knowing this, not reck his rod?” And, the slightly more tenuous but still inescapable, “Why do men, then as well as now, not reck his rod?”
Although we need look no further than shining of foil and oozing of oil to answer this question (that life is suffering and makes no sense and so it seems useless to reck the rod of a heartless God), the following lines further highlight the irony of the question, ringing with clear intonations of the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author tells us that “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.” It may remain forever, but all our toil and our trade have shorn it of life, and our own feet are separated from contact with the earth by our shoes (that very same raiment that we must remove if we are to stand in God’s presence, as Moses before the bush).
After the flurry of irony and percussive anger in the first two quatrains, I read a movement in the speaker’s mind that begins after the space. And for all this—“for” meaning “because of” or “on behalf of?” I prefer the latter—And for the sake of that whole nasty process, nature is never spent / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. No matter how I read these lines, I can intone no irony into their pure song, but doubt returns so quickly as even as the speaker must acknowledge that the very morning he celebrates comes at a brown brink (which I read as a comment on the smudge of pollution that dirtied Victorian skies with hazy coal smog).
After paying brief homage to his doubts, the speaker moves further towards earnestness, acknowledging the brooding hen of the Holy Ghost over the world, a strikingly natural metaphor in a poem that has hitherto insisted on employing figures of trade and toil. The world is bent, yes, but ah! the wings of God are bright despite it all. And how like this interjection comes God’s earnest grace amid the selfyeast of so much doubt!
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