Poetry Purgatory

In No Worst, There Is None Hopkins says ". . . I must be brief" (p. 778). I too, must be brief for after reading just a few short lines of Hopkins work I truly felt that I had entered Poetry Purgatory and fervently hoped that someone was 'praying me through.'

I know...I know....that is a distressing perception for me as a student of literature. Again, I had been refreshed. After Wilde's interesting, witty, and often insightful observations I was ready to move to the Modern writers. Reading through the background information on Gerard Manley Hopkins did nothing to prepare me for the unbelievable difficulty that I experienced trying to read his work.

In God's Grandeur, which I certainly found the most straight-forward of his works, he says

The world is charged with the grandeur of God
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then not reck the rod?

Hopkins appears to be questioning why men, in the face of the world which God has made for us to live in, insist on disbelief in his authority. Most of use have seen the reflection (or shining) which occurs when foil is reflected in the light, so I had little difficulty with his analogy between the "shining from shook foil" (2) and the spreading of God's grandeur. However, I do have difficulty with the analogy he chooses to compare and contrast the "gathering to greatness" (3) of God's grandeur and "the ooze of oil / Crushed (3-4). I understand that oil will run together but the image of the ooze of oil, especially with the addition of the word crushed which implies obtained with violent action, left me with a slimy feel...rather than in terms of a benevolent God.

Parts of the other verses of this poem and especially some of his other work was basically unintelligible to me. I felt as if I were reading some random combination of words and obtained no real sense of what Hopkins hoped to convey.