Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Gerard Manley Hopkins with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
Meaning & context
Hopkins opens by presenting the natural world as filled with divine presence, establishing the theological vision that governs the poem’s images of damage, renewal and grace.
Source details
“God’s Grandeur,” in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins Now First Published, Project Gutenberg #22403. Hopkins wrote the sonnet in 1877; it was published posthumously in 1918. The statement is Christian poetic belief, not an empirical description of nature.
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“Glory be to God for dappled things—”
Meaning & context
Hopkins opens with praise for patterned difference in nature, celebrating irregular color, texture and variety within an explicitly Christian vision of creation.
Source details
“Pied Beauty,” written in 1877 and first published in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918), represented by Project Gutenberg #22403. The poem is a Christian curtal sonnet of praise; its theological attribution of natural variety remains devotional poetry.
Source identified3
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“Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
Meaning & context
Hopkins begins with a child grieving autumn leaves and gradually widens that feeling into a meditation on human awareness of loss, change and mortality.
Source details
“Spring and Fall: to a young child,” written in 1880 and published posthumously in 1918, represented by Poetry Foundation. Margaret is the poem’s addressed child; the meditation is literary and theological rather than a clinical account of grief development.