19 pages • 38 minutes read
God’s Grandeur
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Gerard Manley Hopkins composed “God’s Grandeur” as a traditional Italian sonnet. Like all sonnets, the poem has 14 lines that are divided into two stanzas, an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet. The octet follows the standard rhyme scheme ABBAABBA, while the sestet follows the rhyme scheme CDCDCD. Likewise, the meter is mostly written in the traditional iambic pentameter, or five feet, with each foot having one short (or unstressed) syllable that is followed by a long (or stressed) syllable.
On the surface, “God’s Grandeur” looks and acts like a conventional sonnet. The rhyme scheme follows a consistent pattern, with the end rhymes adhering to the basic form, but that’s just the surface. Hopkins’s poem is filled with internal rhymes, or rhyming that occurs within the lines, and there are even more complex relationships between the internal rhymes and end rhymes of each line (See Sounds for a discussion of internal rhymes).
Furthermore, while the majority of the lines are written in iambic pentameter, Hopkins uses slight variations in meter, an innovation Hopkins called “sprung rhythm.” Sprung rhythm was Hopkins’s primary device in expressing “inscape” (See Inscape in Nature and God), or the inner landscape of a thing, its essence. Hopkins described it as a poetic meter meant to better approximate the natural forms of speech. In sprung rhythm, each foot is composed of a stressed syllable followed by two or more unstressed syllables, according to the thing being described.
The third line has 12 syllables, for instance, while the rest of the poem has the conventional 10. However, the meter throughout each line is not always written in iambs. In the first stanza, “Shining from shook foil” (Line 2) has a different rhythm (stressed/unstressed/unstressed/stressed, stressed). The rhythm here breaks from the traditional iambic pentameter and ends on a foot with two long syllables with two short syllables preceding it. This change in meter surprises the reader in the way it slows down, then speeds up towards the end. The rhythm creates a feeling of exuberance, reflecting the poet’s ecstatic appreciation of God’s magnificence.
Hopkins wanted his sonnets to both adhere to tradition and push its metrical forms into new territory, so he used the sonnet to experiment with his theories of inscape, where he discovered his ability to pursue his religious devotion through poetry (See Summary). In “God’s Grandeur,” as in his other sonnets, Hopkins seamlessly fuses tradition and innovation, creating a new metrical system designed to capture Hopkins’s experiences of the divine.
Sounds
One of the ways in which Hopkins expresses “inscape” (See Themes) is through his attention to sound. Particularly, Hopkins is known for his use of alliteration, as well as internal rhymes.
In the first stanza, Hopkins uses internal rhymes like “seared,” “bleared,” and “smeared” (Line 6) to show how humankind has continued to devastate the natural world to the point where now the world “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell” (Line 7). Furthermore, the end rhymes of “God,” “rod,” and “shod” share an internal rhyme with the repetition of “have trod, have trod, have trod” (Line 5), which mirrors the long “e” sound of “seared,” “bleared,” and “smeared” (Line 6), a repetition of sound that possesses a near painful resonance.
Alliteration is another literary device used by Hopkins, with words like “smeared” and “smell” and “smudge” (Lines 6-7). Yet there are alliterations throughout the entire poem, as in “shining from shook foil” (Line 2), “gathers to a greatness” (Line 3), “West went” (Line 11), “brown brink” (Line 12), and even the inverted alliterations of “warm breast” and “bright wings” (Line 14). For Hopkins, these sounds were how he observed and expressed the inscape of objects by uncovering the ways in which language shared particularities of sound and rhythm between individual words.
Simile and Metaphor
Hopkins begins the poem with two similes in the first four lines that describe the world and its relation to God. In Line 2, he describes “the grandeur of God” as a flame bursting forth, passionate and exuberant. However, in Line 3, he uses a different simile, showing how God’s magnificence also slowly “gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil.” These two similes, though they characterize Hopkins’s view of God as both a slow gathering and a passionate bursting forth, reveal Hopkins’s optimistic view of the world and of God.
Yet, in the next four lines, Hopkins provides a more pessimistic outlook. When introducing humankind’s role in the world, he uses metaphor by describing a world that “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell” (Line 7). This startling metaphor functions to create a dissonance from his more hopeful view of the world in the opening lines, giving the reader insight into Hopkins’s melancholy and more misanthropic outlook.
The final stanza contains a final metaphor in which Hopkins compares the Holy Ghost to a bird that “broods with warm breast” and “bright wings” over the world (Line 14). Hopkins returns to an optimism that echoes the two similes at the beginning of the poem. Both literally and figuratively, the metaphor takes the reader above the world and above the pessimistic view of “man’s smudge” (Line 7), ending on an image of the Holy Ghost as a source of renewed life and loving care. For Hopkins, there is a never-ending well of “freshness” (Line 10) that the world renews, regardless of humankind’s misgivings and failures to see God’s brilliance in the world.
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By Gerard Manley Hopkins
