God’s Grandeur Poetry Analysis

God’s Grandeur Poetry Analysis Title: “God’s Grandeur” might be a poem about God, and his power. Paraphrase: The world is filled with God’s greatness and power, one day it will go out like a light.

It gathers to a high point, and is then crushed. Why then do people not care about His authority; His wrath. Generations after generations have carried on in this depressing manner. Everything is ruined by trade; everything is blurry, being smeared by laborious work.

Everything now is covered with the things people have done wrong: the soil is bare and your bare foot cannot feel the ground anymore because it is cloaked in wrong-doing.

And even after all this, nature is not done for. Underneath all of that human-inspired filth is a sincere freshness. And even though the daylight will set in the west, it will rise again in the east, for morning; this is so because God will watch over us with love and care. Connotations: In the very first line, and throughout the entire poem, the most noticeable thing is rhyme and repetition. grandeur of God” “Shining from shook” “gathers to a greatness” “ooze of oil” “now not” “reck his rod” “foot feel” “nature is never” “deep down” “last lights” “west went” “brown brink” “broods with warm breasts and with…bright wings” all of these are examples of alliteration.

It follows an ABBAABBA in the first stanza and then CDCDCD in the second. However other rhyming takes place within the poem “men then” and “seared with trade; bleared, smeared” are examples of this internal masculine rime. Repetition of the word “trod”, and overall repetition of a consonant sound in the line “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil”.

And of course, the entire poem is a biblical reference to God, and the Holy Spirit. Shifts: It shifts in the first stanza in the fourth line as it asks “Why do men then now not reck his rod? ” Before this point the speaker was just talking about the Earth and God and his greatness and how it will one day be crushed. But with this line, we are introduced to man and his role in this whole crushing-of-God’s-greatness situation.

From this point to the end of the stanza, the poem is clearly negative, as it talks about all the terrible things man has done to ruin the world.

But then it shifts again in the second stanza as it tell us that even though we’ve mangled the Earth horribly, that is only with an outside perspective, and there is still beauty to be found within. Attitude: The tone of the speaker is in the first stanza, very negative and disgusted and detached, while in the second stanza it is hopeful, and positive. * With the line “Why do men then now not reck his rod? ” we get the sense that there is something wrong, and from that point on, all there is, is negative connotations. “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod. ” Trod meaning to basically trample, and keep going steadily.

So the speaker is saying that all these generations are doing the same and steadily trampling God’s greatness. The repetition also gives the word a sound, as it sounds heavy and steady. Also here, we are introduced (although at this point alone we cannot possibly know this) to the idea that whatever wrong the speaker is accusing man of doing is only skin deep, so to speak. With trodding, one does not trample anything more than the skin of the earth that it walks on. It might also be parallel with the idea in the last line of the first stanza, that the earth is now bare, possibly due to the trodding of generations on the surface of the earth.

The speaker is clearly disgusted with man as he says “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil” in this line, we finally figure out exactly what the speaker is so peeved at: it’s labor and trade. Apparently by doing this we are sinning, and blearing-up the surface of the Earth, like a fingerprint smudge on a pair of glasses. This directly relates to the next line “And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil” So now the speaker is saying directly that our sins are the cause of the smudging of the pair of glasses that is the Earth’s surface; Earth glasses, if you will.

We know that he blames us for the unsightly smudge on these Earth glasses because it is the glasses that is coated or “wearing” and “sharing” man’s smell and filth. * Now is also a good time to address the speaker’s detached tone.

He is not so much detached from the words that he is saying; rather he is detached from the subject of his words. He does not associate himself with the rest of mankind. This is clear because he points the finger at “man” instead of saying “we” or “us”; he clearly does not see himself at blame for the smudge on the Earth glasses. As we go on to the second stanza, things look brighter. And more hopeful. “And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” we can tell his mood has shifted, by a few tells.

The first being the very first word “and”, clearly a transitional word, which means we are leaving behind the previous negative idea and moving on to something else. Then obviously, he outright tells us that the battle against the evil smudges on our Earth glasses is not lost, which gives us hope.

In this next line “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” the words “dearest freshness” give connotations of flowery hopefulness and positivity. Title/Theme: “God’s Grandeur” is about how man has spoiled the Earth’s surface with what the speaker believes to be sin, but because of God’s greatness not everything is lost because there is still beauty in the world, despite man’s doing. * So the speaker believes that “trade” and “toil” are the cause for the smear that our aforementioned Earth glasses now “wear” and “share” with us.

Which was basically the peak point in the first stanza.

* Moving on to the second stanza, we get the idea that not all hope is lost, and there is an undying beauty, thanks to God, beneath the surface of our sins. At the line: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” It becomes unfortunately hard to continue our Earth’s-surface-like-glasses simile, because unlike the Earth, glasses do not have anything “deep down” or beneath their surface. However, we could view it loosely in a way of overall meaning, and therefore keep our simile.

Our Earth glasses may not have an underneath, but that underneath part is just a detail, really. The important part is that because of God, the smudge on our Earth glasses can be removed, so God is basically our salvational cleaning cloth, which will wipe away our bleary smudges, and make everything clear and fresh again.

* We know that the speaker accredits God with the cleaning of our Earth glasses, because of the last four lines “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. ” The speaker is basically making his own metaphor to our smudges, as being the setting of the sun in the west, but not to worry, because no matter what we do the sun (or health and beauty) will always come up. Then in the last two lines, he gives us our savior, which from the beginning of the poem, we could have guessed, is God. He says that with God’s warm and caring nature and “bright wings” that “ah! ” we are not to worry, He is the reason that our trade and toil have not penetrated through the core of the Earth. This adds whole lot of meaning to the title and the first line of the poem. “God’s Grandeur” and “The Earth is charged with the grandeur of God.

” We can pretty much look back at that now and think “Oh, I get it now. ” It’s no accident that he used the word “charged” like a battery, and it doesn’t simply mean that the Earth is full of God’s power. Much more intensely, it means that (like the role of a battery) God’s grandeur drives, and keeps alive the Earth; as without it, the speaker imagines the earth would surely fall to sin, and an eternal sunset. ~Meagan Talamantez