God’s Grandeur

Hopkins finds expressions of God throughout the natural landscape, but none more than when he writes about birds. Across Hopkins’s oeuvre, birds appear again and again, likely because of their significance in Christian iconography as symbols of the Holy Spirit. However, in Hopkins’s poems, birds find their significance, beauty, and perfection in their flight. For instance, Hopkins describes a falcon’s flight in “The Windhover”; in his descriptions, the poem’s speaker sees Christ manifested in the bird’s flight path. Although there is no direct mention of literal birds in “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins gestures towards one in the final couplet of the poem in his reference to the Holy Ghost. In the metaphor, Hopkins describes the Holy Ghost as a bird hovering over the world with “warm breast” and “ah! bright wings” (Line 14). For Hopkins, the beauty of birds and the natural world often reflect the beauty of Christ.

Fire and electricity are recurring motifs throughout Hopkins’s oeuvre. In “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins uses fire and electricity to describe God’s glory and presence in the world. First, he describes the world as being “charged with the grandeur of God,” then as a fire “flaming out” into all things (Lines 1-2).