Charged with Grandeur



The 19th century English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had a remarkable way of using language in his poetry which sets him apart from other poets of the Victorian era, and from the English Romantics generally.  It's hard to describe, for me at least.  Hopkins' poems seem playful sometimes, sometimes erudite, sometimes philosophical.  Often philosophical, I think, and even more often religious.

The language he employs can be archaic, antiquated.  He was fond of alliteration.  He seems to have sought to use unusual words--unusual groupings of words--in his poetry, and I believe this sometimes saves him from the sanctimony which too often infuses the writings of the religious, and from being sentimental.  Sanctimony and self-righteousness was prevalent among the Victorians.  Sentiment was prevalent among the Romantics.  In a way, his poetry seems almost modern.

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."  This is the first line of his poem titled, unsurprisingly, God's Grandeur.  It's an arresting opening line.  "Charged" suggests electricity, a force invisible but pervasive, empowering the world as it courses through all that it is, all that's in it.  "Grandeur" as in splendor, greatness, majesty, magnificence.  The world seethes with God's splendor; it's an embodiment of it.  It shines forth "like shook foil."

It seems a Stoic view, to me at least.  Perhaps a view of the world even older than that of the Stoics.  This can be inferred from another of his poems, one with a lengthy and somewhat awkward title, That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.

Heraclitus was one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and what we know of what he thought and taught is fragmentary.  Some of what he is said to have said is well known, like the statement that one never steps in the same river twice, and all is flux.  The fragments we have sometimes seem contradictory, and he is criticized for this by Plato and Aristotle.  The Stoics valued him, however, and it seems Cleanthes especially admired him.  The Stoics seemed to have admired his cosmology, particularly his view of the universe as being eternal and its basis being a kind of fire, divine it would seem as the Stoics conceived of it.  God to him and to the Stoics was immanent in the world.

It seems Hopkins thought well of him also, given the title of this poem.  Like God's Grandeur the poem begins with an artful, witty, even musical-sounding celebration of the world.  "Nature's bonfire" is referred to.  That's the only clear reference to anything like the fire of Heraclitus I can see in it.

In God's Grandeur, the celebration of Nature is followed by lines which express regret that the world has been sullied by man and his toils, bleared and smeared by it, in fact.  Then, hope and wonder is expressed that there remains something beautiful and divine in nature, nurtured still by God in his capacity as the Holy Ghost, or as that person of the triune God called the Holy Ghost.

In Nature is a Heraclitean Fire the celebration ends in sad reflection on the temporary nature of man:  "Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!"  But these broodings are ended by the knowledge of the Resurrection to come after death:   "In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond."

That's very impressive stuff, to me.  And perhaps it expresses and explains better than anything I've read the appeal of Christianity at its beginning to those who came to be called pagans, and its success even though the wisdom of pagan philosophy was acknowledged and admired.  It was an appeal the mystery cults may have had as well to an extent, but were the gods they extolled "what I am" as Jesus was, before his Resurrection, fully man?  But also fully God, it seems, inexplicably to me but perhaps this was, and is, of little concern to true believers, and pagan philosophy forgotten in the acceptance of mystery.