“God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins  

Web resources:  You can find a rather thorough set of references to Hopkins on the web maintained by R.J.C.Watt of the University of Dundee.  For a good overview of Hopkins’ life and works, go to the Victorian Web.  View an image of Hopkins here.

Background:  Hopkins (1844-89) was an English poet who was educated at Oxford where he converted to Roman Catholicism (1866) and eventually was ordained a Jesuit priest (1877).  Hopkins was beset by a profound tension between his religious vocation and his attraction to the world of the senses — a tension that found some release through his introduction to the theology of Scotus which he found a refreshing alternative to the dominant scholasticism of the period.  His poetry was an attempt to capture the uniqueness — or inscape as he put it — of natural objects by the use of internal rhyme, alliteration, and compound metaphor.  His use of “sprung rhythm” approximated the abrupt stress of natural speech and contravened the running rhythm of poetic conventions of his day.  His poetry was not published during his lifetime; it was circulated among friends and not until Robert Bridges brought out an edition in 1918 was any published.  

Discussion questions:

To what is Hopkins referring in line 4?  How does it contrast with the preceding lines?  How does this connect with the middle stanza (lines 7-9)?  What does the expression, “deep down things” (l. 10), suggest to you?  Why does he introduce “the Holy Ghost” into the poem?  Is this a gratuitous interpolation or does it somehow cohere with the flow of the poem’s sense?

Does this selection have any relationship to the overall theme of this section?  How might it relate (if it does) to Bonaventure?  What does it contribute to an understanding of the intellectual journey?