God's Grandeur Hopkins - Judith Wright: Woman to Child

In God's Grandeur Hopkins interchanges nature and God to suggest that humankind's connection with nature is essentially that which we possess with God. Whilst the first octave uses assonance to link the secular to the divine to describe mankind's disengaged relationship with nature, the following sextet reassures the reader that God possess and infinite power of renewal. This is illustrated to the reader using natural images such as "the last lights off the black West" and "the brown brink eastwards" in describing the regenerative cycle of nature and therefore of God.

Hopkins's sprung rhythm in combination with frequent assonance such as "seared...bleared, smeared" imparts a distinct sound to the poetry and links images that would not normally be connected. Interestingly industrial images are used as metaphors for the divine; the Grandeur of God is alluded to as the charge of electricity, "like shining from shook foil", "and the ooze of oil". These images of foil and oil bespeak an all-permeating divine presence that reveals itself in intermittent flashes or droplets of brilliance. Furthermore, this image of God's greatness is then "Crushed", to which Hopkins personifies the soil of the Earth, which "wears man's smudge and shares man's smell" to impart to the reader the abuse that mankind has inflicted upon the Earth. Although Hopkins's exclamations of awe and amazement at the regenerative power of God, such as "Oh, morning...ah! Bright wings" give this poem a prayer like style, the poem is also accessible to nonreligious people as it not only describes the power of God, but also the power of nature and the spirituality that comes with being one of its inhabitants.

JUDITH WRIGHT: WOMAN TO CHILD

Judith Wright uses natural imagery in the poem Woman to Child to express the spiritual connection