Structure and versification in God's Grandeur

A traditional sonnet?

The sonnet form draws attention to itself:

• It is a traditional Petrarchan sonnet
• It was an octave and sestet
• The rhyme scheme is abbaabba cdcdcd
• Basically, it is iambic pentameter, the traditional metre.

But it doesn't feel traditional in its form:

• The alliterative pattern sets up a counterpoint to the metre
• There is often a caesura in the middle of the line, drawing our attention away from the end of the lines and the rhyme scheme there – again, a counterpointing
• Caesuras, or pauses, could be placed in the middle of each line in the octave, though not in the sestet. Can you see where?
• There are obvious enjambements, carried-over lines, as in ‘Crushed' (l.4); ‘Is bare'(l.8); ‘Oh'(l.12); ‘World'(l.14). Each of these has an emphatic point to make and seriously disturbs the smoothness of the iambic lines.

Hopkins' metre

Hopkins' complicated way of using metre is more fully explained in Appendix 1. Here, just some features will be mentioned:

• The first line really only has four stressed syllables (world, charged, grand-, God). So it seems to get off to an irregular start, unless, that is to say, we put a stress on ‘with'. Should we?
• In the second line, we don't see any real iambic pattern. Instead we get ‘flame out', with both words stressed, as are ‘shook foil': emphatic but not regular.

In fact, we wonder how committed Hopkins is to a regular metre. In this, he was foreshadowing the development of modern poetry.

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