In Hopkins's "God's Grandeur," the speaker looks at the world around him and sees things that make him both hopeful and disgusted. In terms of the latter, the speaker demands to know why men no longer reck God's rod—in other words, why they don't heed God's authority.

As the very first line of the poem reminds us, the world is charged with the grandeur of God, and yet too many people seem not to notice it. Due to successive generations of hard toil, centuries of working the land, man no longer sees the ground beneath his feet—feet that are no longer bare—as charged with a spiritual force.

Instead, he sees it as an object to be exploited. This is why men no longer pay heed to divine authority: they cannot see it in the landscape around them. All they can see is land to be worked, "bleared, smeared with toil."

But despite this grim observation, the speaker remains hopeful. In the first line of the sestet—the last six lines of the sonnet—he says,

And for all this, nature is never spent.

In other words, no matter how much we dig up and plow the land, no matter how ignorant we are of God's presence in his creation, the natural world is still charged with the grandeur of God and always will be. What's more, the Holy Ghost will always watch over us, giving us further cause for hope.