G.M Hopkins Study Questions (adapted from guides by A.J. Drake and Florence Boos)
“God's Grandeur”
1. What failure does Hopkins charge common human beings with? What do they fail to perceive in nature?
2. What scientific/technological images are used in the poem? What purpose do they serve?
3. How does this poem assert the capacity of poetic language to celebrate God? What does the poet's description of nature have to do with his determination to praise God?
4. What change takes place between the first and the second part of the sonnet?
“The Windhover”
5. What is the form of this poem? What is its meter? Is it regular in stanza form and rhythm? What are some unusual features of its language?
6. What is a windhover? Can you tell its traits from the poem?
7. What do you make of the epigraph? Does it influence how you interpret the poem?
8. How is the bird described? What is the poet's relationship to him? How does he describe his own response? What do you make of his description of his emotions, “My heart in hiding”?
9. What happens in lines 9-11? How you interpret the word “buckle”? Why may AND be capitalized? What metaphor is presented in this section?
10. What are the poem's metaphors in lines 12-14? What is the importance of the final line, “Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion”?
11. Does the poem end well? What effect is created by the use of several distinct metaphors?
12. What seem to you the most unusual features of this poem?
13. How does the sestet (the final six lines) complete the poem's meaning?
“Pied Beauty”
14. How does this poem attempt to "free" nature from saturation by human consciousness? How might that attempt be said to distinguish Hopkins' treatment of nature from the romantics' treatment of nature?
15. The poem ends with the line "praise him" -- i.e. praise God for the great diversity of things as described in the first ten lines. How is the appreciation of nature's diversity, for Hopkins, a kind of affirmation of God's creative energy?
16. What is the rhyme scheme of the poem? In what way is it reminiscent of the sonnet?
17. Why does the poet choose to praise God as the creator of “strange” things, especially in the context of the last line of the poem, which in a way contradicts everything that has been said before?
“Carrion Comfort”
18. What is the meaning of the title? Why is despair a form of “carrion comfort”?
19. What is the form of this sonnet? What are some features of its language? What situation does it describe?
20. Why does the speaker describe despair as "carrion comfort"? Is despair the same thing as apathy, or is it a different state of mind than apathy? Explain.
21. Why does the speaker turn on Christ and argue with him in the second stanza? What accusation does he level against Christ?
22. What is the quality of the affirmation that the speaker makes, or the resolution he arrives at, in this poem? What can he do about his depression?
23. What are some rhetorical features of this poem? To whom is it spoken? What does the speaker have to struggle to do, and how is this struggle represented?
24. What are the qualities of his antagonist? Who is the one described as “O thou terrible”?
25. What turn seems to occur in the sestet? What are some paradoxes inherent in the imagery of kissing the rod?
26. What confusion of identity does the speaker undergo, and why is this important?
27. How do you explain the parentheses in “(my God!) my God”?
28. Are there any biblical precedents for the notion of wrestling with God? Does the speaker finally receive comfort, and if so, on what grounds?
29. Do you think the poem ends well?
"No Worst, There is None"
30.What is the meaning of the poem's first line? May it be read ini more than one way?
31. What is the poem's form? Is it regular? What are some of its more striking images and word choices?
32. What is this lowest state of the soul that the speaker describes? Why is it appropriate to describe it as a kind of personal hell?
33. What are some of its internal divisions, and how do these reinforce the sequence of thought?
34. What is the significance of the fact that line 7 is divided in the middle of a word?
35. What is the effect of the poet's use of inversions of normal syntax? What "comfort" is provided in the last lines?
36. What is the poem's final message or tone? How does it differ from "Not, I'll not carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee"?