God’s Grandeur

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, this Sunday we looked at the biblical teaching on gratitude. As I prepared to teach on that topic, I wanted to use the poem God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins. However, I could not fit it in – so I decided to share it on the blog this week.

I will give just a few comments and then let the poem speak for itself. Hopkins notes that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. This is similar to the line by Elizabeth Barrett Browning I quoted on Sunday: 

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God

Both note that God’s Presence, His glory, His grandeur are everywhere around us. As I noted on Sunday, this is important if we are going to form grateful souls.

But Hopkins then does something unexpected and amazing. He does not focus on the grandeur itself, but rather on how we humans have marred it until it is hard to see. But for those who look, we can still see God working and restoring, bringing out beauty as He did over the primordial creation in Genesis 1:2.

Enough from me. Here is the poem. Read, meditate, enjoy, and let it be fuel for Thanksgiving 2023.

God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

In Christ,

Bret