Selected Sonnets and Other Lyrics by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The rest of the octet is relatively straightforward: ‘man’s smudge’ blurs the outlines of the sharp electrical surprise of God’s grandeur; the boredom of ‘have trod, have trod, have trod’ (deliberately pedestrian verse) obscures the wonder of the sudden breakthrough of recognising the ineluctable divine energies. These notions answer the question of line four – why do we not put ourselves under divine authority, when, as a consequence, we should be able to see God’s grandeur everywhere in creation?

In the sestet, line ten is an ellipsis. To make easy sense of the clause the reader has to supply ‘in’ – ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down [in] things’ – and by denying this easy sense, Hopkins introduces a momentary confusion, which serves to enrich the meaning. As often in his sonnets, Hopkins then uses brief pictorial analogies to ‘explain’ his point (that nature is always renewed, despite the degrading effects of humanity). Here, it is simply that, while the sun may set in the evening it will always return at dawn. This commonplace idea, however, is brilliantly expressed: ‘Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs.’ Dawn, it may be recalled, is generally a very gradual affair, but Hopkins’s dawn is another ‘electrical’ release of the coiled spring. The rhythm builds to the last, energised, word ‘springs’ (which suggests the season of renewal, and the water that wells up from ‘freshness deep down things,’ as well as the tensed up leap of an animal) through a succession of assonances – ‘morning,’ ‘brink,’ ‘springs,’ as well as the alliterative ‘brown brink.’

The poem concludes with a beautiful enjambment of the ‘bent/World,’ curved, perhaps, beneath the planetary gaze of God, but morally misshapen, too, by the sins of humankind. The Dove of the Holy Ghost, however, ‘broods…with ah! bright wings’ just as He did at the creation, where the Spirit/Wind ‘hovers’ over the face of the deep in Genesis 1. Notice the beautiful interplay of sound as the ‘bent/World’ becomes ‘World broods’ which becomes ‘warm breast’ then ‘bright wings.’ At each repeat of the w/b combination, the vowel sounds rise, ending the poem on a high tonal pitch, as well as a note of supreme optimism. Hopkins’ meaning is that the creation is not something done thousands or millions of years ago, and left to be spoilt; no, the divine creative energies are inherent in the world still, and are constantly renewing and re-creating a world damaged and abused by mankind. The Holy Ghost still hovers creatively over the world.