God’s Grandeur

Hopkins’s poems feature landscapes that are at once secular observations of the world and outcries of religious devotion. This movement from the secular to the religious provides a key to understanding Hopkins’s poetry and how he so seamlessly moves from one register to the next.

While Hopkins writes poems that connect his religious beliefs to the things he sees in nature—like trees and birds and sunsets—he uses various techniques to draw the connection. For instance, his use of alliteration, consonance, assonance, and internal rhymes creates auditory and visual relations between disparate words to describe the behaviors of specific animals, as in “The Windhover” and “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” However, one feature he uses often is exclamatory statements and interjections—such as “ah,” “oh,” and “o.” These lyrical interjections indicate a moment in which the poem transitions from one mode of speech to another, as in the final utterance of “God’s Grandeur.”

While the final stanza of “God’s Grandeur” begins with a description of the natural world, the final three lines pivot to a religious mode of speech when he invokes the Holy Ghost as a bird hovering over the world with “ah, bright wings” (Line 14).