Imageries of Poem “God’s Grandeur”

The poem's establishes the profound connection between God and nature that the speaker explores
throughout "God's Grandeur." God is not connected to nature merely because God created nature.
Rather, the speaker describes God as actively suffused within nature, as an ever-present "charge"
running through it. Further, by describing God's grandeur as being something that will "flame out," or
as being something as tangible as the oil that oozes from a crushed olive, the speaker makes an
additional claim: that human beings can perceive, contemplate, or even interact with God through
nature. The speaker reveres nature not only because it is a divine creation, but also because it is a
direct conduit between humanity and God. The belief in such a deep link among God, nature, and
humanity explains the speaker's despair about how humanity is ruining the natural world. In
destroying nature, humanity is destroying God's creation and severing its own connection to God.
Even worse, humanity is not only destroying nature, but replacing the pristine sights, sounds, and
smells of the natural world—and God's "charge" within it— with the "smudge" and "smell" of human
beings. At the same time, nature's connection to God gives the speaker hope: because it is the creation
of an omnipotent God who continues to watch over the world, nature can never be obscured or ruined
by human beings. The natural cycles of life and death (implied by the references to sunset followed by
sunrise), and the fact that God is still fulfilling his "charge" to protect nature (the way a mother bird
"broods" over an egg), give the speaker confidence that nature will endure humanity's plundering and
be reborn. Yet the speaker seems unsure about humanity's own place within nature's endless cycles:
it's unclear if the speaker's vision of a reborn world includes humanity or not.

There is some interesting 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.
 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.