“Only seemingly,” writes Ellis, “is God s energy fallen, crushed, debased in this world” (128). For, even “though the last lights off the black West went / Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs” (Hopkins 11-12). Or, as 2 Samuel 23:4 prophesies, “he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain.” Again, the vehicle of the metaphor is nature, and its rejuvenation symbolizes Christ s coming into the world. This image of morning springing from darkness also draws our attention to the words of Isaiah: “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily” (58.8). And again:
I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them. (Isaiah 42.16; emphasis added)
The continuing presence of the Holy Spirit is proof of this promise. God continues to work through the Holy Ghost, who “over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings” (Hopkins 13-14). The bent (crooked) world has not been abandoned by God; it will be made straight, for it has been conquered by Him, and it is still being protected by Him.
The bird imagery of line fourteen is drawn from the baptism of Jesus, when “he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him” (Matt. 3.17; Boyle 38). This dove imagery, in turn, is meant to recall Genesis, in which the Holy Spirit apparently broods over the world: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (1.2; Boyle 38). The wing imagery possess a variety of positive connotations. Wings are associated in the Bible with God s healing (Mal. 4.2), with His protection (Ruth 2.12; Ps. 17.8, 26.7, 57.1, 61.4, 63.7, 91.4; Matt. 23.37), with the strength that He imparts to man (Isa. 40.31; Exod. 19.4), and with His conquest. This last association, though not the most obvious, is perhaps the most crucial. When God is said to “spread His wings over” a city, it means He has conquered it (Jer. 48.40). At the end of “God s Grandeur,” God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, has spread His “bright wings” over the “bent world,” implying that He is not only protecting, healing, and strengthening it, but that, despite the seeming triumph of darkness, He has already conquered the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was crushed like an olive for this very purpose.
The world remains charged with the grandeur of God, “in spite of all mankind has done and is doing to pollute and pervert and tread out its radiance” (Ellis 129). God, through the constant presence of His Holy Spirit, continues to rejuvenate physical nature as well as the human spirit; both are “being made over anew” (Wisd. 19.6). So, however dark and dreary this world may appear (and does appear in lines five through eight of the poem), we must not surrender hope. For as Christ exhorted, “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16.33).