God’s Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins composed “God’s Grandeur” as a traditional Italian sonnet. Like all sonnets, the poem has 14 lines that are divided into two stanzas, an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet. The octet follows the standard rhyme scheme ABBAABBA, while the sestet follows the rhyme scheme CDCDCD. Likewise, the meter is mostly written in the traditional iambic pentameter, or five feet, with each foot having one short (or unstressed) syllable that is followed by a long (or stressed) syllable.

On the surface, “God’s Grandeur” looks and acts like a conventional sonnet. The rhyme scheme follows a consistent pattern, with the end rhymes adhering to the basic form, but that’s just the surface. Hopkins’s poem is filled with internal rhymes, or rhyming that occurs within the lines, and there are even more complex relationships between the internal rhymes and end rhymes of each line (See Sounds for a discussion of internal rhymes).

Furthermore, while the majority of the lines are written in iambic pentameter, Hopkins uses slight variations in meter, an innovation Hopkins called “sprung rhythm.” Sprung rhythm was Hopkins’s primary device in expressing “inscape” (See