God’s Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
 
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
 
And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Corinna Laughlin's commentary:

On April 22, we observe the 50th annual Earth Day. So this week, our poem is one with a strong ecological theme:  Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur.” Scott Webster will read the poem, then I’ll be back to offer a brief commentary.
 
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844. In 1866, as an Oxford undergraduate, he was received into the Catholic Church by now St. John Henry Newman. This was a momentous decision, as Hopkins knew he would face significant opposition from his devoutly Anglican family, and indeed his entry into the Church cost Hopkins friendships and caused estrangements in his family which never fully healed.
 
Hopkins had always loved poetry, but he gave it up when he resolved to become a Jesuit. "By God's grace,” he wrote, “I resolved to give up all beauty until I had His leave for it." For seven years, he wrote almost nothing, until one of his Jesuit superiors asked him to write a poem. This opened the floodgates of his creativity, and Hopkins developed his unique voice and style in extraordinary poems for the rest of his short life—he died at age 44 in 1889.
 
In this sonnet, Hopkins describes the world being as being “charged” with the grandeur of God. The word “charged” can mean “full” or “loaded”; it can also suggest an electric “charge”—Hopkins is playing on both meanings here. It’s characteristic of Hopkins to use a wonderful variety of images to capture his meaning. The world is so full of God that divinity flashes out, like light on a shaken piece of foil; it oozes God, as a crushed olive oozes oil.
 
Why, then, Hopkins asks, do men not “reck his rod”—why do people not recognize God’s power in creation?  Instead, they keep at their destructive work, exploiting creation, making it less divine and more human—the earth has taken on our “smudge,” our smell. At the same time, ironically, we are becoming ever more alienated from nature—we no longer touch it directly, like a foot in a shoe.
 
In the second part of the sonnet, Hopkins gives a glimpse of hope. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” This idea of the deep, unique life that all living things have, is one of the hallmarks of Hopkins’ thought. No matter how dark things get, there is the hope of dawn, because God has not abandoned the world—the Holy Ghost broods over the earth like a dove on her nest.
 
Hopkins’ ecological vision resonates with that of another Jesuit—Pope Francis. In “Laudato Si,” his encyclical letter on Care for our common home, Pope Francis writes: “The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God…. The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is God, in that transcendent fullness where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things.”