Ecological Conscience in Hopkins's "God's Grandeur" (2003)

Abstract Arguably well ahead of his time and even ahead of our own, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems were virtually unsung until their publication by Robert Bridges in 1918. Many of Hopkins's poems point to the sentimentality and fixation often associated with the Victorian era, and his poetic complexities distance modern readers from a relative ease of understanding. Nature is the thematic center in God's Grandeur, as in many of Hopkins's most celebrated sonnets. Drawing from Hopkins's focus on the natural world, an ecological paradigm becomes one way teachers can elucidate the work of one of England's most important poets. Another Way to Teach Hopkins Taking advantage of an ecological outlook and using it to ignite student readers is now one of the keys to heightening interest in Hopkins. Hopkins's poetic statements about environment are ultimately successful, as contemporary students can understand the significance of the natural world surrounding them by reading his work in an ecological context. By revealing these ideas to students in the poetry, teachers of Hopkins can more seamlessly cover the more abstract concepts of nature: beauty in nature; rhapsody, detachment, and coalescence with nature; and, finally, students' interconnected, symbiotic places in the natural world. Arguably the most celebrated of Hopkins's poems are his nature sonnets, one of the most notable being God's Grandeur. As with most of Hopkins's nature sonnets, God's Grandeur blossoms with luxuriant and luscious language, utilizing the fields and forces of the natural landscape to channel Christological, ontological, and, as I will argue, ecological didactics. This poem also reveals Hopkins's almost painful sensitivity to the inscapes of his environment, to his anagogical keenness in bringing meaning to and from the natural world. A myriad of texts exist concerning both the Christological and linguistic function of Hopkins's work, but there is little in the way of Hopkins and ecology. This is not to suggest that ecocriticism itself fails to bloom in today's literary community; the greening of texts plays an integral role in contemporary English studies since scholars like Cheryll Glotfelty and Karl Kroeber have become America's authoritative guides on the subject. Here dwells another conundrum: Kroeber's intensive ecocritical approach to the Romantic poets in his book-length study Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind succeeds in both linking and contextualizing the English Romantic poets to contemporary social and scientific activities, but the great majority of ecocriticism is chiefly American-centered, attuned to writers like Thoreau, Robinson Jeffers, and William Carlos Williams (The Ecocriticism Reader). Since the 1970's, American perception has grown more adjusted to an ecologically-centered milieu, and this America, still the most wasteful nation on earth, has produced concerned, ecologically minded literary scholars in direct proportion to its increasing environmental consciousness. Many students today also share this interest in ecological issues and the material world. While the studies created from this consciousness (and creation) of American environmental toxicity and potential disaster are crucial, almost no contemporary ecological studies apply to the nature poems of the Victorian era, a time synonymous with the rise of industry and a similar perception of environment. In order to construct an adequate understanding of nature-centered and nature-conscious literature, it is necessary to observe the gestation of this particular mentality. Hopkins deserves to be included in these studies because his work is sensitive to the motif of ecological interconnectedness and the broken relationship between humans and the wilderness in the upset industrial landscapes of Victorian England. More important to the teacher of Hopkins's is his ecological sensibility and how it applies to the modern student. …