Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of
the most important poets of the Victorian era. He was also a Jesuit priest. He
wrote ‘God’s Grandeur’ in 1877. It is an Italian sonnet. It contains fourteen
lines divided into an octave and a sestet. The title word ‘grandeur’ from the
French, means greatness, grandness. The poem explores the relationship between
God and the world of nature and how the divine is infused in things and
refreshes despite the efforts of humans to ruin the whole show.
In the first stanza, the
poet says that God’s grandeur is revealed to us in different ways. In one way it
flames out with sudden brilliance, as when a silver foil is shaken and it gives
out glints of light. Another way is that God’s glory manifests itself slowly
over a period of time, so when the oil crushed from olives slowly oozes out and
gathers into a thick pool. The poet then continues to say that it has been so
in the past and it continues to be so in the present that people do not care
for the authority of God. The reason, for people’s inattentiveness is that they
have become fatalistic to their misfortune. Hopkins gives more reasons behind
it. He says men have now become too much materialistic and business minded.
Like a galloping horse, generations have moved onward, have worked hard to
threshold an era of industrialization and commercialization. The poet further
says that, the filth and dirt of human selfishness have spoilt God’s grandeur
and thus have poisoned world of Nature. Men are so much busy at their work that
they cannot even think about this decay for a little while. They are confined
to their narrow circle of routine life and thus accepted their fate. Man has
become quite indifferent to the loss of the beauty of the Nature and also his
own natural beauty. As a result he has become too hard, too insensitive and too
crude.
In the second stanza, the poet says that inspite of all the
oddities a bright dawn can be expected. Poet has faith in God and so he is
optimistic; he thinks that the Holy Ghost is perpetually hovering and brooding
over the earth and the mankind as a bird broods over an egg and sustains the
life in it with its warmth. This beautiful imagery of the mother-bird brooding
over its egg conveys to us a sense of living relationship. The poet expects
that Nature can never be exhausted. Though people have become rude and
indifferent to the Nature but Nature never betrays the man. She is too
benevolent to give her all and thus become inexhausted. It is a perennial
source of freshness with which the earth is renewed every time when spring
comes; dark night and gloomy days are replaced by the new light of the sun of
the horizon.
No comments:
Post a Comment