Selected Sonnets and Other Lyrics by Gerard Manley Hopkins

This is a favourite term, particular in his neologism ‘instress,’ which he uses to mean the action of perceiving the special divine individuality of something in creation. To instress something is to experience some form of divine epiphany.

The ‘shook foil’ idea is found in Hopkins’ prose of the period: ‘Shaken goldfoil gives off broad glares like sweet lightning and…owing to its zigzag dints and creasings and network of small many cornered facets, a sort of forked lightning too.’ We are used to foil being used in baking etc, but its original use was to back gem stones in jewellery so that the light was reflected back at the observer. So the world is a sort of foil, reflecting back the ‘grandeur of God.’ There is a chance that Hopkins was also thinking of a fencer, shaking his ‘foil’ or weapon.

The poem begins in iambic pentameter, but Hopkins soon injects the extra syllables that cause what he called a ‘sprung rhythm.’ Extra unstressed syllables create a tension that is only resolved when the final stress is reached, which is frequently heavily emphasised as a result. The initial lines of God’s Grandeur are a very good example of this. The first two are both ten syllables long, with three main stresses per line: ‘charged,’ ‘glory,’ ‘God,’ then ‘flame,’ ‘shining,’ ‘shook.’ By the time we get to line three, however, the main stresses fall on ‘greatness’ and ‘ooze’ and the final stress on ‘Crushed’ is delayed until line four. This ‘sprung rhythm’ (like a spring coiled, then released) is augmented by the fact that there are twelve syllables in line three, all building up to the enjambment of ‘Crushed,’ which precedes an early caesura. Even though the meaning of these lines is quite distinct from the idea of God’s ‘charge’ breaking through at moments of stress, the sound of the lines actually carries the former meaning through from lines one and two. In fact, the meaning of this clause is as follows: that, once discerned, ‘in a flash,’ the ‘grandeur of God’ is suddenly seen to permeate the whole of creation; this sense of the divine, therefore, spreads precisely like the ‘ooze of oil/ Crushed:’ like an anointing, in fact, of the whole world with God’s Grace. Just possibly, the crushing of the olives (like the pressing of grapes to make wine, or the breaking of bread at the eucharist) is a reference to the Crucifixion. Grace is liberated only when Christ is broken (at the ultimate moment of stress on the cross).