EthicalDative

Bret Stephens, conservative columnist for the New York Times, Jew raised in Mexico, fluent Spanish speaker, quotes (from memory) a poem called “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins at the end of The Conversation with Gail Collins. 

In my reading I rarely seek out Hopkins any more, but when he’s put before me I’m seduced again by his jazzy prosody. The poesy theurge channeled by the English Jesuit induces contemplative frenzy in the susceptible. Am I one?

Take rhyme (please! — ha-ha!): In current verse I almost always find recurring end rhyme to be deafening and deadening as far as lifting poetry from the trenches is concerned. English is a consonantal, assonant tongue with dirty vowels and minimal morphological inflection. The language isn’t built for long stretches of ding-donging from a daft belfry. Hopkins, however, can make daft sexy. It’s to be noted from the start that all the poem’s rhymes are made from common, monosyllabic words.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. […]

Messiahs are anointed (oiled) beings (Spanish untado. Arabic masīḥ, meaning wiped, clean, smooth, besides anointed.) Shining shaken from foil, betokening the flaming out of a light source, cuts the mustard as a bit of derring do in the way of simile. Enjambment takes the pressure off the incestuous rhyme of oil with foil, landing the beat on a strongly voiced adjective at a pausal juncture: Crushed. Boom! Stress that would fall on “oil” is shunted to the next line. Line 3, the one with ooze, is a solitary hexameter.

Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

“Then now” — conjunction next to adverb: The feisty collocation manages to connote epochal habituation, an unending history of not reckoning with the Boss, not following His Rules. Hopkins triples down on the rod-trod pairing — more kissing cousin coupling! Far from shifting stress off the rhyme, he compels attention to it with tolling repetition, conveying again the feel of endless traipsing and trampling, wallowing in waywardness. Everyone has strayed, does stray, will stray. There follows a rampage of rhyme and half-rhyme alloyed with alliteration.

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, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;

And for all that, Mother Earth, at least, is thriving, evergreen, never-changing. Ha-ha! The showy sequence is admirably legible, thanks in part to the kindness of punctuation. Behold this phrase without its strategic comma: “nor can foot feel being shod.” 

On top of lucidity, Hopkins excels at one of the things I admire most: syntactic compression. He expels the rank man-breath from verbiage, like air burped from Tupperware. There’s a taut, tight tension in one phrase of the following line which is borderline manic. Can you spot it?

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

It’s in the locative adverbial phrase “deep down things.” Eliding the preposition “in” (or “within” or “inside”…) after “down” falls just shy of redlining comprehension, in keeping with how Hopkins buffs phrasing to the bare bone.

The poem ends on pious fustian exercised exclamatorily over a black-brown-brinkish-brooding-breasty thing with ah! bright wings. It has shot its fox before reaching the Holy Ghost — a fall from grace poetically, except for one trope: the world is bent. God yes — double, like the pitiable creatures in a Salvadoran hoosegow. The last word is the poet’s, blessèdly.

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved