Duality of Creation

By murp, Student

Analysis of Gerard Hopkins

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

Duality of Creation

Gerard Hopkins’ love for God and appreciation of divine creation is abundantly visible in much, if not all, of his writing. The appreciation and respect is blatantly expressed in his poem titled God’s Grandeur. The beauty of Hopkins’ poetry is that the acknowledgement of the splendor of creation can be accepted with open arms by people of any faith or people of no faith at all.
From the very first lines of the poem, Hopkins sets the perspective: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” To the devout Christian, these lines are reflective of a principal taught from Sunday school. That this grandeur will be a dazzling and expanding light show for the soul of the beholder is an appropriate way to describe the greatness of an entity that could sculpt and create the awesome beauty of the naked planet. And if one chooses to look at God in the context of this poem as a Metaphor for some inexplicable cosmic accident to be praised for its good turn at the crap shoot of life, having created by blunder this marvelous planet, then so be it. Either way, the lofty idea of creation and all of the attached magnificence cannot be disputed by anyone.
For Hopkins to refer to his recognition of the grandeur of God as the “shining from shook foil” can be viewed as a common thought among people of various religious faiths. The Buddhists refer to something similar as Enlightenment. When one is lucky enough to recognize the hand of his creator, simple words are not enough to describe that split second of awareness; however, light from shining foil comes pretty close. Atheists and evolutionists will just have to the words of enlightened men for what they are worth.
To all beautiful faces there is a flaw. Sometimes the flaw is so cryptic that it may go unnoticed. Hopkins portrays man as a growth on the tip of the nose of the earth, marring its beauty with his footprints of progress: “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”(6-8). His point is that man, through his race for progress and prosperity, has lost sight of the big picture: God’s grandeur. He stresses this point by saying “nor can Foot feel, being shod”(8). Once again the evolutionist/environmentalist would agree that man does not often take the time to allow himself to be wowed by the sheer magic of creation. With the dawn of Nintendo and Nike, creativity is blasé.
Hopkins comes across with Blalock’s “Great So What” in the second and final Stanza of the poem. No matter what man does, no matter how he scurries through life wearing blinders and chasing the setting sun, God encompasses the earth with the wings of the coming dawn; always present, always bright. Oh ye of little faith may also shout that nature perpetuates itself: the sun goes down and will come up, ultimately sustaining and creating life. Hopefully.
Whether one finds comfort in the cradling arms of a sublime creator or stands wide-eyed in amazement in front of the primate habitat at some zoo gawking at a not too distant cousin, the reality of the sheer magic of creation can be enjoyed by reading God’s Grandeur. However, it is certain that Hopkins would rather the reader attribute the whole of creation to God rather than chance.