Blog Assignment

I liked the poem "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Hopkins. It has a lot of feeling and emotion, and it shows where Hopkins was at emotionally at that time in his life. He uses a lot of end rhyme, such as "toil, foil, oil, rod, God, things, springs" and so forth. I feel that this rhyme keeps the reader going, and his repetetiveness wasn't too much when I read it. Well, maybe a little bit, but it still works. The tone of this poem is frustration, maybe even a touch of resentment in the first stanza. The second stanza's tone is a bit more of "looking forward" at what God is actually doing, setting in the west and rising as the Holy Ghost at sunrise. The speaker could be Hopkins, but I picture any man in that state would be able to write a poem like this. He is identifying with the common man, asking questions like "Why do men then now not reck his rod?", showing the same beliefs and questions that many others have.(It says at the bottom of the page that reck is to reckon, like heed his punishment.) He uses a lot of universal symbols, such as "wearing man's smudge", "shares man's smell", and "all is seared with trade". Even talking about the sunset and sunrise is universal. There is a metaphor, or maybe figure of speech, but I don't exactly know what he means. "It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed." Oil can't literally be crushed, it can be pressed, but not crushed from greatness. So it is a figure of speech about how God's greatness, in man's eye, is being crushed, or pressed, like oil. All in all, an angsty poem from a thirty three year old Catholic.