Gerard Hopkins wrote God's Grandeur in 1877 right around the time he was ordained as a priest. The poem deals with his feelings about God's presence and power in the world. He could not understand how the people inhabiting the earth could refuse or be distracted from God. This confusion was due to the greatness of God's power and overall existence that, to Hopkins, seemed impossible and sinful to ignore. However, as the poem progresses Hopkins expresses hope in the world and God's everlasting presence in it. This poem has much meaning to it and expresses the thoughts and feelings that Hopkins was having at the time he wrote it. When one first reads God's Grandeur it is hard to fully understand what Hopkins was trying to convey. One must first look into the life of the author himself to begin to grasp what the words of the poem indirectly mean.
Hopkins was born on July twenty-eighth 1844 as one of nine children in Stratford, Essex. He was born into a flourishing Europe that was growing rapidly industrially. Both of his parents were very much involved in the Catholic Church, and his father had published a volume of poetry a year before his birth. As one can determine from this, much of his influence came from his parents. Hopkins began writing poetry in grammar school during which he won a poetry prize. This prize gave him a scholarship to Balliol College in Oxford, where he earned two degrees and was considered by his professors and peers to be the star of Balliol. Throughout his life he was very connected to his religion. So much that in 1868, after joining the Society of Jesus, he burned all of his work because he felt that it conflicted with Jesuit principles. It was not until 1872 that he began to write poetry again. It was t...
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... will that holds it in one piece. People might look at this in a different way now based off of the fact that an even larger amount of people ignore the grandeur of God than in the late 1800s. Maybe religion truly is dying? I myself agree with Hopkins. I would like to believe that there will be a day when people begin to realize that we are heading in the wrong direction and spirituality should not be disregarded. My view may be biased because I am a religious person myself, but I believe that there is one thing that we can all agree on; without hope, we are all doomed.
Works Cited
Everett, Glenn. "Gerard Manley Hopkins: a Brief Biography." The Victorian Web. 1988. National University of Singapore. 1 Apr. 2006 .
Hopkins, Gerard. "God's Grandeur." The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2005. 876-876.
William Blake was probably more concerned than any other major Romantic author with the process of publication and its implications for the interpretation of his artistic creations. He paid a price for this degree of control over the process of printing, however: Blake lived in poverty and artistic obscurity throughout his entire life. Later, when his poems began to be distributed among a wider audience, they were frequently shorn of their original contexts. For William Blake, there has been a trade-off between the size of the audience he has reached and the degree of control he exerted over the publication process.
In order for a person to really understand how Mr. Hughes’s life shaped his poetry, one must know all about his background. In this paper, I will write a short biography of Hughes’s life and tell how this helped accent his literary genius.
Born in London, England in the early seventeenth century, Milton grew up to be a widely respected and known poet and a considerable political proponent (“John Milton”). Growing up, he excelled in his schooling and frequently attended church services. At the age of seventeen, Milton continued his education at Christ’s College located in Cambridge, England. After some consideration, he fully decided writing poetry would be what he would do for the rest of his life. During the time when
Amazing Grace is a legendary song” published in 1779”(www.princeton.edu/-achaney/tmve/wiki100/docs/Amazing-Grace.html) that is also a poem where there are verses in this poem that suggest that the composer John Newton (1725-1807) was going through a pivotal point in his life and he felt that by writing these harmonic verses in rhythmic metaphors could captivate and inspire not only those that read “Amazing Grace” but especially everyone that listened to its meaning. Conviction can come at a time when it seems you are most likely going to die from an act of God, and all the wrong that someone has done becomes a consciously enormous burden when they start to consider what the after life may have as punishment or reward. There are many different responses to this poem. Most of the responses are positive, but when you look at the author John Newton’s life you will start begin to understand the gist of what he is saying and the meaning behind them. The point of view, tone, and content are some elements that prompt some very interesting responses that may alter ...
The theme of authority is possibly the most important theme and the most popular theme concerning William Blake’s poetry. Blake explores authority in a variety of different ways particularly through religion, education and God. Blake was profoundly concerned with the concept of social justice. He was also profoundly a religious man. His dissenting background led him to view the power structures and legalism that surrounded religious establishments with distrust. He saw these as unwarranted controls over the freedom of the individual and contrary to the nature of a God of liberty. Figures such as the school master in the ‘schoolboy’, the parents in the ‘chimney sweeper’ poems, the guardians of the poor in the ‘Holy Thursday’, Ona’s father in ‘A Little girl lost’ and the priestly representatives of organised religion in many of the poems, are for Blake the embodiment of evil restriction.
Masson, Davis. Essays Biographical and Critical: Chiefly on English Poets. La Vergne, Tennessee: Lightning Source, Inc., 2007.
William Blake, was born in 1757 and died in 1827, created the poems “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” and Proverbs of Hell. Blake grew up in a poor environment. He studied to become an Engraver and a professional artist. His engraving took part in the Romanticism era. The Romanticism is a movement that developed during the 18th and early 19th century as a reaction against the Restoration and Enlightenment periods focuses on logic and reason. Blake’s poetry would focus on imagination. When Blake created his work, it gained very little attention. Blake’s artistic and poetic vision consists in his creations. Blake was against the Church of England because he thought the doctrines were being misused as a form of social control, it meant the people were taught to be passively obedient and accept oppression, poverty, and inequality. In Blake’s poems “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” and Proverbs of Hell, he shows that good requires evil in order to exist through imagery animals and man.
Lewis Carroll lived a disciplined and diligent life and accomplished many accolades in numerous fields of academics. His ability to do this was through the means of his family’s support and the era of which he lived in. These factors composed his disposition, which resonated throughout his literary works.
Edward Taylor’s Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold are similar in their approach with the illustration of how beautiful and magnificent God’s creations are to humankind. However, each poem presents tragic misfortune, such as the death of his own children in Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children and the cold, enigmatic nature of human soul in Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold. Taylor’s poems create an element of how cruel reality can be, as well as manifest an errant correlation between earthly life and spiritual salvation, which is how you react to the problems you face on earth determines the salvation that God has in store for you.
One day he was walking around and a riot broke out in London. It was incited by the anti-Catholic preaching of Lord George Gordon. That event took place on June in the year of 1780. That occurrence inspired him to do works like “Europe’ and “America,” and it also motivated him to write about his Protestants to war and the domination of kings in his poetry. He continued his studies and went to the Royal Academy on October 8, 1779.
William Blake was a poet and artist who was born in London, England in 1757. He lived 69 years, and although his work went largely unnoticed during his lifetime, he is now considered a prominent English Romantic poet. Blake’s religious views, and his philosophy that “man is god”, ran against the religious thoughts at the time, and some might equate Blake’s views to those of the hippie movement of the 20th century.
“God’s Grandeur” is a poem that embraces the grace and glory of God in everything, and is certainly an example of his strong faith in God. Imagery is found from the very beginning of the poem. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and “charged” here is very significant because it is a metaphor symbolizing the world being engulfed with God’s electricity (ll. 1). Electricity is a primary source for us as humans, which makes this an image of light associated with faith found in a single word in the first line alone. The second says that the electricity “will flame out, like shining from shook foil” (ll. 2). Line 2’s simile now connects with line 1’s metaphor as it further describes the metaphor. Moreover, if one has ever seen how light hits shook foil, then it becomes easy to understand the imagery because it glimmers so much. This enhances the relationship Hopkins establishes between images of light and his strong Christian faith.
The imagery of nature and humanity intermingling presents Blake's opinion on the inborn, innate harmony between nature and man. The persona of the poem goes on to express the `gentle streams beneath our feet' where `innocence and virtue meet'. This is where innocence dwells: synchronization with nature, not synchronization with industry where `babes are reduced to misery, fed with a cold usurous hand' as in the experienced version of `Holy Thursday'. The concept of the need for the individual's faithfulness to the laws of nature and what is natural is further reiterated in `the marriage of heaven and hell' in plate 10 where Blake states `where man is not, nature is barren'. The most elevated form of nature is human nature and when man resists and consciously negates nature, `nature' becomes `barren'. Blake goes on to say `sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires'. This harks back to `the Songs of Innocence' `A Cradle Song' where the `infants smiles are his own smiles'. The infant is free to act out its desires as it pleases. It is unbound, untainted. Blake's concern is for the pallid and repressed, subjugated future that awaits the children who must `nurse unacted desires' and emotions in this new world of industrialisation. Despairingly, this is restated again in `the mind-forg'd manacles' of `London'. The imagery of the lambs of the `Songs of Innocence' `Introduction' is developed in `the Chimney Sweeper' into the image of `Little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head, that curl'd like a lamb's back, was shav'd'.
...giving paradox of salvation history. The apostle Paul chose to explain this essential principle through the science of exposition. Hopkins, however, decided to express the hidden heart of the gospel through the art of poetry. Both men were master communicators:
The sight of an angel made William Blake the most celebrated poet of his time, it influenced in his poems and painting, which it became gothic to people and made him a spiritual person. William Blake was born over his father hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London in Nov. 28,1757. His father was James Blake a hosier, and his mother Catherine Wright Armitage Blake. (Blakearchive.org) William Blake, being mostly educated at home learned how to read and write by his mother and later on went to school. His parents watch that he was different from others and they didn’t push him to attend to school, the main reason why his mother decided to instruct him. “They did observe that he was different from his peers and did not force him to attend conventional school.” Later on, Blake saw a positive thing after, writing “Thank God”… I never sent to school…”(Bloom, page 37) Apparently William Blake was a special boy, and a true believer of faith. When Blake was four years old, he told his parent he had experienced his first visions of God “His first vision occurred…when he was four. He saw God who “put his head to the window and set (Blake) screaming.” (Bloom, page 26) A couple years later, when Blake was nine years old, William claimed he had experienced new visions of angels. “ When Blake as a child told his mother “That he saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a Tree in the Fields.”” (Bloom page 26) Those visions changed William life. An age of ten William confesses to his parents that he wanted to be a painter. Later on, his father sent him to a drafting school. “At age ten, Blake expressed a wish to become a painter, so his parents sent him to drawing school.” (Guterberg.org) Two years later William began c...