God's Grandeur

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.
The first four lines of the octave (the first eight-line stanza of an Italian sonnet) describe
a natural world through which God’s presence runs like an electrical current, becoming
momentarily visible in flashes like the refracted glintings of light produced by metal foil
when rumpled or quickly moved.

Alternatively, God’s presence is a rich oil, a kind of sap that wells up “to a greatness”
when tapped with a certain kind of patient pressure. Given these clear, strong proofs of
God’s presence in the world, the poet asks how it is that humans fail to heed (“reck”)
His divine authority (“his rod”).

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?

The second quatrain within the octave describes the state of contemporary human life—
the blind repetitiveness of human labor, and the sordidness and stain of “toil” and “trade.”

The landscape in its natural state reflects God as its creator; but industry and the
prioritization of the economic over the spiritual have transformed the landscape, and
robbed humans of their sensitivity to the those few beauties of nature still left.

The shoes people wear sever the physical connection between our feet and the earth they
walk on, symbolizing an ever-increasing spiritual alienation from nature.

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.

The sestet (the final six lines of the sonnet, enacting a turn or shift in argument) asserts
that, in spite of the fallenness of Hopkins’s contemporary Victorian world, nature does
not cease offering up its spiritual indices.

Permeating the world is a deep “freshness” that testifies to the continual renewing
power of God’s creation. This power of renewal is seen in the way morning always
waits on the other side of dark night. The source of this constant regeneration is the
grace of a God who “broods” over a seemingly lifeless world with the patient nurture
of a mother hen.

This final image is one of God guarding the potential of the world and containing
within Himself the power and promise of rebirth.

With the final exclamation (“ah! bright wings”) Hopkins suggests both an awed
intuition of the beauty of God’s grace, and the joyful suddenness of a hatchling bird
emerging out of God’s loving incubation.
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.
Form

This poem is an Italian sonnet—it contains fourteen lines divided into an

octave and a sestet, which are separated by a shift in the argumentative
direction of the poem.

The meter here is not the “sprung rhythm” for which Hopkins is so famous,
but it does vary somewhat from the iambic pentameter lines of the
conventional sonnet.
THEMES
MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD

The speaker in "God’s Grandeur" looks deeply at the natural world, and
doesn’t hold back his or her contempt for the ways in which people and their
industries have treated nature.

Yet, Hopkins claims that the consequences of this treatment is only on the
surface.

This poem explores the idea of renewal, both for a damaged earth, and for the
damaged people who walk upon it.
LIFE, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND EXISTENCE

Among other things, "God’s Grandeur" proposes that the meaning of life
and the purpose of human existence can be discovered through nature.

As an expression both of intense anxiety and of intense joy, this poem

can seem to be on the serious side. But all the language play within the
poem lightens the tone, and can give us a different perspective on life,
whether we agree with the poem’s ideas or not.
RELIGION

You can tell from the title that "God’s Grandeur" is probably a religious
poem. The speaker is telling us about his or her religious visions. The
speaker sees God as intimately connected to the earth. The exotic language
of the poem moves us through this fascinating religious journey.
TRANSFORMATION

In the world of "God’s Grandeur" everything is shifting and changing and

moving. For better or worse, the potential for change runs through Gerard
Manley Hopkins’s verse.

The speaker’s vision is at once apocalyptic and full of bursting green life, as
he or she both laments change and yearns for it.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and

plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.
The poem opens with an offering: “Glory be to God for dappled things.”

In the next five lines, Hopkins elaborates with examples of what things he means to
include under this rubric of “dappled.”

He includes the mottled white and blue colors of the sky, the “brinded” (brindled or
streaked) hide of a cow, and the patches of contrasting color on a trout.

The chestnuts offer a slightly more complex image: When they fall they open to reveal
the meaty interior normally concealed by the hard shell; they are compared to the coals
in a fire, black on the outside and glowing within.

The wings of finches are multicolored, as is a patchwork of farmland in which sections

look different according to whether they are planted and green, fallow, or freshly plowed.

The final example is of the “trades” and activities of man, with their rich diversity of
materials and equipment.
Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and

plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

In the final five lines, Hopkins goes on to consider more closely the characteristics of these
examples he has given, attaching moral qualities now to the concept of variety and diversity
that he has elaborated thus far mostly in terms of physical characteristics.

The poem becomes an apology for these unconventional or “strange” things, things that
might not normally be valued or thought beautiful. They are all, he avers, creations of God,
which, in their multiplicity, point always to the unity and permanence of His power and
inspire us to “Praise Him.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.
Form

This is one of Hopkins’s “curtal” (or curtailed) sonnets, in which he

miniaturizes the traditional sonnet form by reducing the eight lines of the
octave to six (here two tercets rhyming ABC ABC) and shortening the six
lines of the sestet to four and a half.

This alteration of the sonnet form is quite fitting for a poem advocating
originality and contrariness.

The strikingly musical repetition of sounds throughout the poem (“dappled,”

“stipple,” “tackle,” “fickle,” “freckled,” “adazzle,” for example) enacts the
creative act the poem glorifies: the weaving together of diverse things into a
pleasing and coherent whole.
THEMES
RELIGION

"Pied Beauty" is a celebration of natural creation supported by traditional

religious expressions of praise and glorification.

We have trouble deciding whether the poem is meant to be a private and

personal prayer (it was never published in Hopkins's lifetime), or if the
speaker is addressing an imagined audience.

The poem was written in 1877, the same year that Hopkins was ordained as
a Jesuit priest by one of his heroes, the famous English writer and
theologian John Henry Newman.

"Pied Beauty" comes near the height of Hopkins's religious fervor.

MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD

In Hopkins's poetry, nature does not exist without man.

He doesn't take the view that man exploits nature, but rather Hopkins's
landscapes are filled with the tools and marks of humanity just as it is filled with
trees in birds.

On the other hand, his view of nature, at least in this poem, is limited to the
things one might see in the English countryside.

The poem is pastoral, meaning it shows natural beauty in an agricultural setting.

Humans model their own activities after nature, and the diverse blend of colors
and forms in the natural world serves as a metaphor for the diversity of man's
trades and crafts.
AWE AND AMAZEMENT

The speaker admits that he has no idea how the world came to be filled with
"dappled things." He can offer no explanation but can only describe and
admire.

Some religious thinkers would say that nature must be beautiful because it
was created by God. Hopkins says that God is praise-worthy because He
created such a mysterious and beautiful world.

Maybe there's not a huge distinction between the two views, except one of
attitude. Hopkins seems to have an appreciation of natural diversity for its
own sake, in all things great and small, and regardless of their relation to
human ends.
TRANSIENCE

According to "Pied Beauty," the beauty of the earth is dependent on change.

Hopkins sees the patterns of transient beauty in the greatness of a clouded

sky or the smallness of finches' wings. According to the speaker of this
poem, God is the only being that does not change. God brings change into
the world.

Hopkins adopts the Catholic view that God is the only unity in the world –
everything else exists in diversity.
The Windhover
 To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover (remain in one place in the
air) in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of
prey.

The poet describes how he saw (or “caught”) one of these birds in the midst of
its hovering. The bird strikes the poet as the darling (“minion”) of the morning,
the crown prince (“dauphin”) of the kingdom of daylight, drawn by the dappled
colors of dawn.

It rides the air as if it were on horseback, moving with steady control like a rider
whose hold on the rein is sure and firm.
In the poet’s imagination, the windhover sits high and proud, tightly reined
in, wings quivering and tense. Its motion is controlled and suspended in an
ecstatic moment of concentrated energy.

Then, in the next moment, the bird is off again, now like an ice skater
balancing forces as he makes a turn.

The bird, first matching the wind’s force in order to stay still, now
“rebuff[s] the big wind” with its forward propulsion. At the same moment,
the poet feels his own heart stir, or lurch forward out of “hiding,” as it
were—moved by “the achieve of, the mastery of” the bird’s performance.
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in

his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl

and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
The opening of the sestet serves as both a further elaboration on the bird’s
movement and an injunction to the poet’s own heart.

The “beauty,” “valour,” and “act” (like “air,” “pride,” and “plume”) “here
buckle.”

“Buckle” is the verb here; it denotes either a fastening (like the buckling of a
belt), a coming together of these different parts of a creature’s being, or an
acquiescent collapse (like the “buckling” of the knees), in which all parts
subordinate themselves into some larger purpose or cause. In either case, a
unification takes place.

At the moment of this integration, a glorious fire issues forth, of the same order
as the glory of Christ’s life and crucifixion, though not as grand.
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Form

“The Windhover” is written in “sprung rhythm,” a meter in which the

number of accents in a line are counted but the number of syllables does not
matter.

This technique allows Hopkins to vary the speed of his lines so as to capture
the bird’s pausing and racing. The poem slows abruptly at the end, pausing
in awe to reflect on Christ.
THEMES
AWE AND AMAZEMENT

The inspiration for "The Windhover" is the speaker's awe and amazement
at the windhover's awesome and amazing skill at hovering on the wind,
and he's more than a little impressed.

One of Hopkins's goals in writing poetry was to inspire his readers with
the same kind of awe and amazement that he felt when looking at simple,
everyday objects—like a bird in flight. And we'd say this poem succeeds.
APPEARANCES

“The Windhover" is about the speaker's admiration for a beautiful bird, true.
But it also touches on some bigger philosophical questions—like how even
boring, everyday objects can appear beautiful and amazing if only we know
how to look at them in the right way.

This poem is partly meant to show us how to open our eyes to see the beauty
hidden in everyday things.
MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD

In "The Windhover," the speaker gets wonder struck as he sees

a bird in flight.

There's something about seeing this bird in its natural element,

hovering on the wind, that the speaker of "The Windhover"
finds absolutely awe-inspiring.
STRENGTH AND SKILL

We can't discuss "The Windhover" without talking about the poet's

inspiration for writing: the awe-inspiring strength and skill of the bird
itself.

This bird, commonly called a windhover because of its ability to hover

on the wind, can actually fly in place in the air, even with high winds
buffeting it around. No wonder Hopkins felt inspired.
INSCAPE AND INSTRESS

In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms, “inscape” and
“instress,” which can cause some confusion.

By “inscape” he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each

thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things.

By “instress” he means either the force of being which holds the inscape
together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of
the beholder.
PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY
• The renewal of the romantic tradition – supposing it to have been broken by Browning and
Arnold – was the work of a group of poets known as the pre-Raphaelites

• About the middle of the century – in 1848 – to be precise – a few painters combined to
oppose the existing pompous conventions of Academics of Art which ignored such modern
painters as Blake, Turner, and Constable.

• They called themselves Pre-Raphalites to emphasise their admiration for the Italian painters
before Raphael (1483-1520) whose work they thought was characterised by simplicity,
sincerity and religious feeling.

• The term thus meant a return to medievalism, one of the chief characteristics of
Romanticism.

• Though a painters’ movement, its connection with literature was due to the fact that its
leader D.G.Rossetti was both painter and poet.

• The poets who besides Rossetti came to be associated with the group were William Michael
Rossetti, Christina Rosseti, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
• Freshness and simplicity in the handling of detail went side by side with a deep sense of
the significance of detail, the symbolic and sacramental meaning of objects, such as we
find in the symbolism of medieval religion and painting.

• The Pre-Raphaelites deliberately invoked medieval images and aesthetics in their work.

• The poetry used symbols (some of it obscure), especially from theology and religion.

• There was also a major strand that dealt with love, especially tragic love, and mortality

• The Pre-Raphaelites were criticised for being too concerned with the body. Their poetry
often portrayed voluptuous bodies.

• The Pre-Raphaelites attempted to combine a hard realism (they are famous for their
attention to detail) with heavy symbolism, seeking to make a comment on contemporary
society while simultaneously suggesting a higher state of being.
THE GOBLIN MARKET by
Christina Rossetti –

SUMMARY
Every evening, when sisters Lizzie and Laura go to fetch water from a nearby
stream, they must listen to the tempting calls of goblin men selling delicious
fruit.

Lizzie fears the goblins and admonishes her sister to do the same. When they
catch sight of the goblins displaying their wares on golden platters, Lizzie runs
home, but Laura is entranced.

Despite the goblins' demonic appearance, resembling cats, rats, snails and
covered in whiskers, Laura hears only the coo of doves. The goblins see her and
repeat their cry.

Although Laura has no money, the goblins accept a lock of her hair as payment
for the fruit. Laura drinks her fill of fruit juice and returns home, intoxicated by
the sweet nectars. She brings one fruit stone (pit) home with her.
Lizzie meets Laura at the gateway to their home and scolds her sister for
returning late. She recounts the tale of their friend Jeanie, who ate a piece of the
goblin fruit and then pined away to her death because she could not get any
more.

Laura assures her sister that all is well and that she plans to buy enough fruit for
both of them the next day. The sisters proceed with their housework.

The next day, Laura discovers that she cannot see the goblins anymore nor hear
their calls, although Lizzie still can.

Laura pines for the fruit, losing her health and youthful vigor. After some futile
attempts to plant the fruit pit, Laura despairs. She stops eating and working.
Lizzie fears that Laura will die soon, so she places a silver penny in her purse
and goes to the goblin men.

She asks for fruit for her sister, but the goblins instead invite Lizzie to join
their feast. When she refuses, the goblins beat her and try to force the fruit into
her mouth, smearing her face with juice.

She does not succumb, and the goblins soon tire of torturing her.
Lizzie returns home and tells Laura to kiss the juice on her face, and
Laura does so.

The juice acts like a poison and Laura collapses into a deathlike state.

Lizzie remains by her sister's side through the night and in the morning,
Laura awakens, her health and beauty restored.

Years later, when they are both married, the two sisters tell their children
the tale of the goblin men. Laura ends the story with the moral, “there is
no friend like a sister.”
ANALYSIS
This narrative poem has an irregular rhyme scheme and loose
iambic tetrameters, which quickens the pace.

The loose meter allows for the narrators' spontaneity, and the rapid
pace lends a tone of urgency.

Lizzie and Laura, the narrators, deliver the poem as a lesson to

their children.
There are two popular interpretations of “Goblin Market”: one reading is
religious, and the other focuses on gender and sexuality.

Because it is difficult to prove Rossetti's original intent, scholars have

invented a useful dichotomy.

If the reader is more familiar with the religion, the reader will see the
Christian allegory.

However, if the reader is well versed in the study of gender and sexuality,
then the symbolism will more readily relate to that topic.

However, these interpretations are not mutually exclusive; rather, they

should be viewed in tandem to extract the maximum meaning from this
poem.
In the Christian interpretation, Laura represents Eve, the goblin men
are the equivalent of Satan, their fruit is the temptation to sin, and Lizzie
is the Christ figure.

Laura sins by going against the interdiction that she must not eat the
goblins’ fruit, which is an homage to Adam and Eve eating the forbidden
fruit in the Book of Genesis.

The long list of the goblins' fruit represents the wide variety of temptations
that humans face during their lifetimes.

Like Adam and Eve, Laura discovers that the fruit does not bring
fulfillment, but rather, death and destruction.
Meanwhile, Lizzie suffers the consequences of Laura’s sin in order
to rescue her sister from the punishment of death, just like Christ.

The red fruit juice that Lizzie tries to get Laura to drink is like the
blood of Christ in the Eucharist.

Rossetti describes Lizzie as a pure “lily in a flood," and that is why

she is the only person who is able to save Laura’s life.

The sacrifice Lizzie makes for her sister comes out of pure love and
true friendship.
The second interpretation of "Goblin Market" is based on symbols of repressed sexual
desire and sexual violence.

Lizzie and Laura are both innocent and virginal at the beginning of the poem, but
Laura’s curiosity proves to be stronger than her sister’s warning.

Rossetti creates an uncomfortable struggle between the consequences of pursuing lust

and the need to explore natural human desires.

Amidst charged language like “sucked” and “heaved,” Laura loses her youth and
bloom (her virginity, essentially) as a result of taking the goblin men's tempting fruit.

In Victorian society, a woman’s deflowering marks her transition into adulthood as a

wife and mother. However, because Laura is not married, the encounter strips her of
her "maiden" status prematurely. Laura did not heed her sister's warning, and now, just
like Jeanie, she will suffer.
Lizzie's trajectory in this interpretation, however, is not quite as straightforward.

Rossetti uses the language of sexual violence when the goblin men attack her
with fruit, but Lizzie refuses to drink the juice and she manages to hold onto her
virtue.

Lizzie makes a sacrifice so that Laura can heal and recover.

However, the difficulty of this interpretation is that lost maidenhood cannot be

recovered. Instead, Laura’s redemption could be refer to her reintroduction into
normal social relationships, because at the end of the poem, she is married with
children.
The motto, “there is no friend like a sister,” coincides with the feminist theme.

Sisterhood and female community were important to Rossetti, who worked with
prostitutes at the St. Mary Magdalene Home for Fallen Women.

Perhaps she hoped that through this poem, even fallen women could seek a path to
redemption, leaving their past indiscretions behind. However, there is a darker side to
the feminist interpretation.

Much of the language in “Goblin Market” refers to buying and selling. In Victorian
England, women were expected to follow a certain standard of conduct. Failure to meet
these standards led to the depreciation of a woman’s worth when she came to the
marriage "market."

Unlike Laura, Lizzie heeds the warning and safeguards her money in her purse, thereby
protecting her maidenly virtue.
THEMES
WOMEN AND FEMININITY
The world of "Goblin Market" is a woman's world. We never meet any male characters,
and the only sign that men exist at all comes at the very end, when we're told that Lizzie
and Laura have become "wives".

Even then, though, there's no sign of their husbands. This is surprising, given Christina
Rossetti's close attachment not only to her mother and sister, but also to her brothers,
Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti. Although they encouraged her writing,
Christina's brothers never allowed her to become an official member of their artistic
movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Maybe the exclusively women's world of "Goblin Market" is Christina Rossetti's answer
to her brothers' exclusively male artistic movement.

The critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that "Goblin Market" is partly about
the exclusion of women from the male-dominated artistic world during the Victorian
period.
VIRGINITY/SEX
Although Christina Rossetti always insisted that "Goblin Market" was a poem
for children, it's hard for readers to miss the erotic imagery and sensual
language that pervade the poem.

Critics and readers have read Laura's temptation to eat the goblin fruit as a
metaphor for sex and loosening of virginity.

But if eating the fruit is a metaphor for losing her virginity, how is it that
drinking the fruit juice off of her sister's bruised face restores it?

The theme of sex is obviously complicated in "Goblin Market," and the poem
resists a straightforward allegorical reading.
DRUGS AND ALCOHOL
Some critics, like Laura J. Hartman, think that Laura's experience
at the "Goblin Market" is similar to drug addiction.

This reading makes some sense. After eating the fruit, Laura can't
think about anything but her next taste of goblin fruit.

Her final recovery can only occur after eating some of the goblin
juice her sister brought back for her. This might be akin to how the
withdrawal symptoms of heroin addiction are sometimes treated
with methadone, a chemical similar to heroin but less harmful.
SIN
Whether you read Laura's binge on the goblin fruit as a sexual escapade or as
the beginning of a descent into chemical addiction and withdrawal, the poem
certainly seems to want us to read it as some kind of a sin or transgression.

Lizzie is able to resist temptation, but Laura and Jeanie (the girl who died)
give in to their curiosity and desire for that tasty, tasty fruit.

Many critics and readers think of Laura's temptation to eat the goblin fruit as
an allusion to the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden in the Judeo-
Christian creation story.

But instead of getting thrown out of the Garden, like Eve did, Laura gets a
second chance because of her sister.
VIOLENCE
The real violence in the scene in "Goblin Market" where Lizzie gets beat
up by the goblins makes many readers uncomfortable.

If eating the fruit is interpreted as a loss of virginity, does that mean that
the goblins' attempt to force-feed Lizzie is an attempted rape?

The poem isn't explicit about this, but Lizzie's physical pain and Laura's
violent fever during her recovery definitely require more attention.