God’s Grandeur

In the tradition of a sonnet, Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur” can be viewed as a love poem written to God. Yet, the poem transcends this tradition to become something more dynamic, functioning also as an argument for Hopkins’s religious views on nature, God, and humankind’s relation to both.

Hopkins begins his sonnet with a series of similes and metaphors to establish a connection between God and the world. The first line provides a metaphor for the “grandeur of God” as a “charge” that permeates the world, as if God was an electrifying force. The next two similes follow a similar pattern, revealing God’s grandeur to be at once a “flame” that rapidly ushers forth from the world “like shining from shook foil,” then as a slow gathering “to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / crushed” (Lines 2-3). Hopkins captures in these two images a portrait of God’s grandeur simultaneously as a passionate, exuberant explosion of life and as a quieter energy that simmers beneath the surface of the world.

However, the poem pivots in the fourth line when Hopkins poses the question, “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” (Line 4).