God's Grandeur

The central idea of this poem is that the "grandeur of God" is so fundamentally a part of the world, which he created and "charged with" his power and beauty, that it can never entirely be "spent."...

“God’s Grandeur” (1877) is packed to the seams with literary and poetic devices, but there are two kinds of techniques into which I’ll delve in particular. The first of these has to do with...

These words come in the second stanza of the poem, which begins, Generations have trod, have trod, have trod, And all is seared with trade; smeared, bleared with toil And wears man's smudge and...

In "God's Grandeur," Hopkins uses many figurative devices, but the one repeated most often is alliteration. Alliteration means using words that begin with the same consonant more than once in a...

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / crushed. In this line, the alliteration is happening on the stressed syllables. ("Ooze of oil" is not quite a perfect alliteration, but it is...

In the hustle and bustle of modern life, man is often too busy to sense God's greatness in the world around him. In this age of mass industrialization, we treat the ground beneath our feet as if it...

People are too busy with their everyday lives to notice the grandeur of God in each and every corner of the natural world. In their ordinary, workday existence, they treat nature as an...

The poem "Fire and Ice" was written by Robert Frost, originally published in 1920. In "Fire and Ice," the speaker explores two powerful emotions or motivators that he thinks could potentially bring...

Most definitely. Consider the first stanza of this incredible poem. Consider how there is a divide between the first three lines and the next word and the rest of the poem, which describes man as...

According to Hopkins, God shows his greatness or grandeur everywhere in the world. Wherever we look, he is there. He's even in the soil beneath our feet as we tread upon it. Indeed, nature as a...

The poem says that God's grandeur animates nature. The speaker compares this grandeur to two antithetical or opposite aspects of nature. First, he likens God's grandeur to the light that shines and...

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in this poem, is praising the continual rebirth of nature and the fact that it displays God's creation and His "dearest freshness." In stating that nature is never "spent,"...

In the poem "God's Grandeur," the nonhuman world is defined as a sort of spiritual charge emanating from God, which exists side by side with and enriches the human world. The human world, the...

In the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, inscape refers to that unified complex of characteristics that make a thing what it is, that make it unique. As a devout Christian, Hopkins believes that the...

Most of the hope in the poem "God's Grandeur" is evident in the second stanza. The first stanza describes how mankind has ignored the grandeur of God and, worse than that, has "trod . . . trod . ....

Gerard Manley Hopkin's poem "God's Grandeur" is written in "sprung rhythm," a term Hopkins himself coined. The poem is broken into two stanzas, an octave followed by a sestet, and comprised of...

In the first quatrain, Hopkins tells us that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. What he means by this is that the presence of God is deeply embedded in every single aspect of his...

"God's Grandeur" is what's called a Petrarchan sonnet. This is a poem consisting of fourteen lines with a rhyme scheme of abbaabba cdcdcd. Petrarchan sonnets are divided into an octave (eight...

According to the speaker of the poem, human beings have alienated themselves from God by ceasing to fear divine punishment, "his rod," and by separating themselves from God's creation of nature....

The sacramental principle refers to the idea that God's presence is everywhere and that God's grace is available to people through everyday interactions with others and with nature. In his poem...

Before attempting to analyze any of Hopkins's poetry, it is important to know that he was a devout Catholic and a Jesuit priest. His conception of the natural world was that it was a manifestation...

There are two stanzas in the poem "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet which consist of fourteen lines. The first stanza of this poem consists of eight...

In "God's Grandeur," poet Gerard Manley Hopkins does not prove to us that nature is kind and generous. Instead, he makes a faith statement about God's goodness and grandeur. It is the Holy Spirit...

In the poem "God's Grandeur," the poet, or speaker, is unhappy with human beings because he feels that they do not respect the natural world. The natural world is, the speaker proposes, the...

Syntax, or the structure and order of words, is particularly evident in this poem in the way that Hopkins uses the order of words and his sentence construction in order to reinforce his central...

Throughout his poetry, Hopkins uses a form of poetic rhythm called sprung rhythm, which is supposed to reproduce the rhythms of everyday speech. In very simple terms—because discussions of sprung...

The eighth line of this poem is particularly tricky, I think, because there is only one word in the whole line that has more than one syllable: being. So, we are on our own for all of the...

The last line of "God's Grandeur" is a classic example of sprung rhythm, a technique invented by Hopkins to make his poems sound more like the spoken word. To this end, he places stressed syllables...

Hopkins uses the invocation of God in the poem to establish what he sees as essential in the world. The poem can be appreciated outside of the domain of religion, as well. For example, if one...