Now that you know all of these terms, what do you write about?

The temptation might be to jump straight to interpretation, to start arguing about meaning, and to start engaging in research. But to engage in research too early can actually be counterproductive. Too often, readers fixate on a theme or idea that means a lot to them, so they see that theme or idea replicated everywhere. Soon, they begin trying to fit poems into predetermined readings or patterns of meaning. However, if we follow closely the poem, consider carefully the words on the page, and allow the form and content to dictate the shape of our research questions, then we are more likely to have an honest engagement with the source poem and the research.

With that in mind, let’s demonstrate a close reading of a much-anthologized poem: Gerard Manley Hopkin’s “God’s Grandeur.” As you will see, Hopkins’ particular skill with both imagery and rhythm make his work well worth analyzing.

A cursory glance at this poem reveals two stanzas: the first an octet, the second a sestet. The total number of lines is 14, making this—you guessed it! A sonnet.

You might have heard of the Shakespearean, or English Sonnet; this sonnet is a Petrarchan, or Italian sonnet. In many ways they are very similar: written in rhyming iambic pentameter, usually about love, and presenting a turn, or shift in the tone of the poem, at a predetermined place. However, the turn comes in different places for each type, respectively, this revealing the major structural differences between the two types of sonnets. For the Shakespearean sonnet, the turn comes after the second quatrain or before the final couplet. Here, in the Petrarchan sonnet, the turn comes after the opening octet, just before the final sestet. The opening octet consists of two rhyming quatrains, here with the rhyme scheme: ABBAABBA. The rhyme scheme of the final sestet varies from poem to poem, but here it is: CDCDCD. Nothing about this structure suggests, so far, that the poet is using the sonnet structure in original or inventive ways.

The speaker of the poem is never clearly identified, but the subject of the poem is humanity’s effects on nature, and the ability of God, who is in this poem equated with nature, to refresh nature despite humanity’s poor stewardship. We know that sonnets often present variations on the theme of love, and this poem is no exception; only, rather than focusing on romantic love, or eros, this poem focuses on agape, or the love of God for all of humanity. The opening quatrain begins with a declaration of the power of God as manifested in nature: “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” (1). The word charge has been italicized here because it is very revealing: God here is a potential source of energy contained in all things, waiting to be unleashed, such as when we touch a balloon that has gathered a static charge. After this declaration of the power of God in nature comes a description of humankind’s effects on nature, a species who trods and smears and blears and toils and who, in general, is cut off from nature by his own doing. Within the octet, darkness gives way to dawn, and we are reminded that, despite all of humanity’s efforts, there awaits a renewing force in the Earth, a “freshness deep down things” (10) that is being incubated by the Holy Ghost, with its “warm breasts, and ah! bright wings” (14).

The syntax and punctuation of this poem create variations in rhythm that deviate from the standard iambic pentameter, and as such, call attention to themselves as deviations. The first quatrain reveals the syntax and punctuation that makes the rhythms possible. Stressed syllables are in bold:

The world / is charged / with the gran / deur of God.

It will flame / out, like shin / ing from / shook foil;

It gath / ers to a great / ness, like the ooze / of oil

Crushed. / Why do men / then now / not reck / his rod?^[2]

This scansion, which comes from Rosebury, emphasizes the sprung rhythms, a type of poetic rhythm meant to approximate natural speech. With sprung rhythm, there are usually four stressed syllables per line, and an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables. The metric feet can range from one to four syllables (in traditional rhythms, the longest metric feet are dactyls and anapest, which have three syllables.) There is also a preponderance of spondees, as seen here with oil/crushed or shook/foil. From this ‘spring’ comes the name sprung rhythm. Accordingly, despite most sonnets being written in iambic pentameter, this poem exhibits a different pattern. There are metric feets of iambs, “the world is charged” but in the same line they are mixed with anapests, “with the grandeur of God.” Line 2 contains a trochee, the double emphasized “shook foil” lending emphasis to the overall euphony of this line (“f” and “sh” sounds working together to imitate the image of shook foil—silver-foil, gold-foil, etc.). And there is at least one stressed foot made up of a single syllable: “crushed.’’ This emphasis reveals a menacing edge to God’s power and love: he could crush mankind, too, if he wished. The final question falls back into iambic pentameter, and if you do not know what “reck” means, now would be a good time to look it up.

For a fun experience, try reading this and other poems aloud while experimenting with different meters. You can do this alone, but it is better with friends, or in class. How does this poem change when read with sprung rhythm vs iambic pentameter? Which do you prefer? Why?

Unique word choices and syntactic variations emerge from the use of alliteration, assonance, consonance, and epistrophe, and the sounds of the poems begin to imitate the sense. We have already seen how the repetition of the f and sh sounds serves to imitate the sound of shook foil. In the second quatrain, we learn that “generations have trod, have trod, have trod” (5). An unnecessary repetition in prose, in verse this epistrophe places a thudding emphasis on every step any person has ever trod on earth. Because of humanity, “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared” (6); the assonance of the ea combined with the consonance of the -red sound serves to elongate and drag out those words, like a verbal smearing that matches humanity’s smearing of the earth. Alliteration directs the verse through the sestet—“dearest freshness deep down things” (10)—and builds to the final couplet, which relies heavily on the alliteration of b and w, revealing an interesting pattern: “world broods with warm breasts and with ah! bright wings” (14). In the combination “world broods,” both words have the letter o within, but pronounced differently; the same is true for “warm breasts” and “bright wings.” The word choice is, as we have seen, often driven less by reason and more by sound.

There are many powerful images in this poem. Some of them are couched in similes. For example: “flame out, like shining from shook foil” (2). Not only can we hear the flaming in the f and sh sounds, we are also given a visual representation, the sun gleaming on a bright surface; the two senses taken together achieve synesthesia, the deliberate mixing or confusion of two or more senses within an image. We also get the “ooze of oil / Crushed” (3–4), geological pressure that is compared through simile to the greatness of God. We hear and smell humanity throughout this poem (Hopkins uses the gendered and archaic ‘man’ to refer to all of humankind), but perhaps the most lasting image is that humanity’s feet are shod: the very shoes on our feet become a powerful symbol of our separation from the natural world. The sestet also provides a pair of powerful images: “the last lights off the black West” (11) and morning, that “at the brown brink eastward, springs” (12). Finally, the poem ends on the image of the Holy Ghost, who broods over the world with a warm breast and bright wings. Could this be an implied metaphor? What sort of creature broods over its young, has wings, and is known for their breasts? Chickens? Ducks? Is the author comparing the Holy Ghost to a chicken? Such bathos, or a lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial, is not unheard of in poetry, but perhaps the Holy Ghost as mother hen might suggest too much of a turn from the gravity of this poem, a poem that holds itself in awe of the sublime of God’s grandeur. The implied metaphor is likely a dove, something we maybe could not divine from the poem, but might realize once we researched Hopkins’ religious beliefs.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest. He also wrote this poem in 1877, though it was not published until 1918. Why could he not find an audience for his poetry in his time? What changed about poetry and its reception that made audiences more accepting of the sort of sound-driven verse Hopkins wrote? Another way of asking that question is: what changed in the poetic tastes between the Victorian period and the Modern period, which is associated with the early 20th century? These questions, and many others, are the sort you might consider for a close reading or research essay.