Lightning and A Warm Breast: Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur"

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur,” though concerned with the state of an overworked world, retains hope in the everlastingness of nature and God. Though “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod” along, increasingly bored and disillusioned with life, God’s glory remains. Hopkins’ picture of what man has done to the earth is not a pretty one: “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” (lines 6-8). Trade and toil were to represent progress; an increase in either would lead to greater internationalism and development. Yet Hopkins characterizes this trade and toil extremely negatively: trade “sear[s],” as toil makes everything “bleared, smeared,” and filthy. Amidst all of this—perhaps the worst effect of all—people lose their humanity: “nor can foot feel, being shod” (line 8). Even a foot, the most basic and down-to-earth part of a man, can no longer feel the earth beneath it, since it has been clothed and desensitized. That, it seems, is how Hopkins sees this so-called progress: clothing that man can put on. Trade and toil make us money and give us possessions; they provide for our families; they determine our success, but all at the price of really feeling and knowing the glory of God.

Interestingly, this negative series of lines about humanity is sandwiched between two parts describing God and nature. The first four lines of the poem are about God’s lightning-powerful love. God’s glory is everywhere; “[t]he world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as it would be charged before a thunderstorm (line 1). This glory does not merely build up and remain passive. Instead, “[i]t will flame out, like shining from shook foil” (line 2). God’s glory flutters down, catching the light and sparkling as it falls to the earth. Yet there is a gradualness even still to it, since it “gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed” (lines 3-4). The reference to something being crushed is probably intended to refer to olive oil, which is also referenced quite often in the Bible. Olive oil is used for anointing people, as well as for cooking, for providing light, and many other functions. Thus, as God’s grandeur is a mysterious, impossible, incredible phenomenon like lightning, it is also in the everyday miracle of simple fruit.

The end of the poem brings the reader back to this sort of happy, hopeful note. Nature, fortunately, “is never spent,” despite all of man’s failures (line 9). In Nature, the “dearest freshness” lives “deep down things,” where it cannot be quenched (line 10). Man could always repent, implies Hopkins. Nature and God are both accepting of repentant sinners against them: Nature because it can never be extinguished, and God in his infinite grace. At the last, Hopkins declares his eternal surprise with Nature, as “the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings” (lines 13-14). Even in his last line of the poem, Hopkins discovers something new and beautiful about creation. Nature, then, is ever-surprising and ever-evolving, which complements God as the eternal, unchanging one. Between these two points of hope, man has only to turn from his world of trade and toil to be enveloped in shook foil, a warm breast, and bright wings.