After the long blogging pause...Poetry

This poem is by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He wrote it just before the turn of the century when intellectuals were doubting and God was the farthest away from vogue. In 1914, poets announced that "God is Dead." I like what Hopkins has to say about all of this. It is called "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;	5
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;	10
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.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the read. Here's my ideas about what this poem is doing:
First, the poet is explaining the grandeur of God. He seems to say that it is hard to miss, even the atheist must see the wonder of the reflection and refraction when light hits tin foil that is crinkled and waving in the breeze. Besides being a visible wonder, the light seems to be "charged" with some energy which is not perceptible, and it builds up with "greatness" until the person under the influence of the Holy Ghost understands better the atonement, or in the imagery of the poet, "the ooze of oil / Crushed." The oil and the olive press represent Gethsemane, and the oozing of it has reference to the slow and painful sorrows that Christ felt--it could also represent his bleeding from every pore.

The poem then explicates a problem! Why does no one seem to feel and see these apparent blessings? "Generations have trod," and many people work their lives away without experiencing the divine. They busy themselves with toil and play around in the soil, but they never see the creator reflected or refracted in His works. The fact that mankind has forgotten God makes their soil (or souls) bare, and because they are getting by (with their feet shod) they cannot symbolically feel the beauty of the earth.


In the last 6 lines, Hopkins shows how truly merciful God's grandeur really is: "nature is never spent," this means that God is never giving up on us. Those who look can still find those "deep down things;" and, even though it appears that the sun is setting over all earth with the decline of morality in all its valences, the Holy Ghost is still bent over the world in the posture of service trying to help and comfort those who will come to God. This Holy Spirit has "Bright wings," suggesting to the mind the image of a hen gathering her chicks. God Loves us all. He wants us to be happy, and he gives us trials adapted to our individual growth and he grants us blessing according to what we need. We need to have faith to know that all trials and all blessing are for our good. Life is good when we live with God on our side.