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crossref-it.info - AS/A2 English Literature Study Guides - texts in context.

 

Poems for study » God's Grandeur » Imagery and symbolism in God's Grandeur

There is some interesting and tightly packed imagery in the poem.

Foil

From Hopkins’ own writing, the image of ‘shook foil’ seems to have been the one that fascinated him most. Most of us use tinsel at Christmas, and have noted how it catches the light as it moves. Hopkins uses this as a simile here, in connection with the metaphor of the world being ‘charged’, in the way in which now a car battery may be ‘charged-up’. Here, if you like, the world is so full of God’s electricity, that it will spark (‘flame out’) on contact. We can see how Hopkins thinks in images here: a simile is used to describe a metaphor further.

Oil

The ‘ooze of oil’ refers to when some oil-bearing product, such as an olive, is crushed. This seems almost a contradictory image: a mere touch will produce a spark; then a wholesome crushing is needed to get oil just to ooze out.

Investigating God's Grandeur
  • Can you see a way of resolving this contradiction?
    • Has it something to do with human experience?

Night and day

The other dramatic imagery clusters in the centre of the sestet, contrasting night and day. ‘The last light off the black West’ dramatises symbolically a hopeless situation. In Hopkins’ later ‘Terrible Sonnets’, such imagery becomes frequent. But it is countermanded by the ‘brown brink eastward’ of dawn and hope: an obvious, but effective juxtaposition.

Holy Spirit / dove

The last line contains the imagery we have discussed of the Holy Spirit. Here the Spirit is seen maternally, a brooding bird with ‘warm breast’: a bold image to make concrete what would otherwise be a very abstract idea.

As readers, we have come a long way in fourteen lines from dramatic electrical imagery to quiet, feminine, nurturing imagery. We need to understand this is the landscape of Hopkins’ own spirituality.

Investigating God's Grandeur
  • What is the force of ‘broods’?
  • Who is ‘bent’?
    • And in what sense?
Figure of speech in which a person or object or happening is described in terms of some other person, object or action, either by saying X is Y (metaphor); or X is like Y (simile). In each case, X is the original, Y is the image.
'Mass of Christ', a celebration or feast of the birth of Jesus Christ.
An image where one thing is said to be 'as' or 'like' another: e.g. 'He jumped up like a jack-in-the-box'.
An image or form of comparison where one thing is said actually to be another - e.g. 'fleecy clouds'.
In literature, something that is chosen to take on a particular meaning by the writer, e.g. clouds as symbols of mutability.
A sonnet is a poem with a special structure. It has fourteen lines, which are organised in a particular manner, usually characterised by the pattern of rhyming, which changes as the ideas in the poem evolve.
The deliberate placing together of two items for contrast; in terms of drama, the placing together of two contrasting events or scenes, so that each is heightened in relation to the other.

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.