Hopkins, England and God's Grandeur

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. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
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;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
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.

God's Grandeur, G. M. Hopkins.

I love this poem, it came up today in a book I have which contains 365 verses, one for each day. Reflecting on it I noticed a comparison with Chesterton's poem at the head of this post. Contained within it is a deep lament for the lost world of country beauty and goodness. But more on that in a bit.

(*)Hopkins wrote this poem in 1877. It has the shocking vibrancy and brilliance that characterises Hopkins poetry. Hopkins was seeking ways to show the 'inscape', or species of things and of words; seeking to scrape back the centuries old use of a word and discover its meaning and the essence of it. The poem is full of the glory of God and for this Hopkins uses the word Grandeur, a much less familiar term. The world as he says is 'charged' with it and he uses the imagery of lightening and electricity. Interesting is the fact that electricity was a new invention in Hopkins day so the comparison with God's charge and mans. Later we see 'the lights of the black West' fading. In other words, man's glory (his artfulness and technology) are dim, but the world God created is 'charged' with his splendor. His grandeur 'will flame out, like shining from shook foil'. Hopkins has in mind here gold foil. When looked at from one aspect it is dull, but seen in another it shines, like lightening. Here we see an image for the world as dull and made dull by man, but it really shows the Glory of God to those who have eyes to see.

God 'gathers to a greatness, like ooze of oil / Crushed', while the world is being prepared and is in preparation for Christ and the coming of the Holy Ghost, as we see at the end. God's glory is in creation and in redemption. The oil of mercy will heal us.

What I am particularly interested in are the next lines because I believe it reveals something at the heart of English radicalism. Chesterton and Belloc, among others, were often looking back to an agrarian tradition, lost in England by the onset of the industrial revolution (see Rural rides / W. Cobbett). Much that was ugly, smelling and wretched in England was down to large factories and towns and as Chesterton thought big business. England was scarred and blighted my mills and mines and the common man had lost his tools, lost his trade and his soul.

Here Hopkins, looking from a distinctly spiritual point of view saw something similar. Why was the Grandeur of God in creation and redemption not there for all to see? 'Why do men then now not reck his rod?' Why have they rejected his authority and his love? The answer: 'Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wear's man's smudge and share man's smell: the soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod'.

We see here a loss of sensitivity in man over generations. All the world is 'smeared with toil', 'man's smudge' and 'man's smell'. The earth is bare, beauty is gone and man cannot see it. His senses are blocked so that nothing can get through (his is a consumerist). 'The soil / Is bare now', yet full of man's labours and we cannot see or feel our feet 'being shod'. This stark vision of man, who has a 'bleared' view of the world is very much what Chesterton had in mind. The modern world kills the soul because we are bound by 'toil' as wage slaves, we possess many things 'with trade' and yet we have no sense of God's goodness, His opulence, His grandeur.

This is were I feel Distributism has a legitimate voice. Belloc's Servile State seems to me a good representation of modern economics, but his political solutions are more horrific than the servile state. If we were to put into practice the ideas of a 'distributist state' in the Bellocian sense we would end up with a super-state, watching over every minute detail of, ensuring no businesses grew to large, forcing certain people into farms and so on. The distributist state would end up as bureaucratised, impersonal and totalitarian as the communists states of the last century. However, if we see distributism not as a political solution but as a theological one it takes on a different shape entirely. If work is transformed (no matter the industry be it finance, factory work etc.) into a true vocation, the work of God, then our captivity to the 'black West' can be broken. Work will always be toil, but it need not carry the drudge of the generations. If leisure is anything, it is the ability to worship God, to see and be with the transcendent, in fact to worship the Glory, the Grandeur of God. Thus, if we radically change our spiritual lives, we can through God's saving grandeur spiritualise the world.

'[N]ature is never spent; / There lives the freshness deep down things', not only nature but Super-nature. Deep down in hidden depths is a freshness that is always there for those with eyes to see. If we listen to our calling, the world will always be a welcome place '[b]eacuse the Holy Ghost over the bent / world broods with warm breast'. This created world is always ready for renewal by God, and though the world may stink and be 'smeared' we can find the Spirit 'with, ah! bright wings'.

(*I used the commentary of Aidan Nichols, OP in his excellent book: Hopkins : theologian's poet. Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2006)