Consider Hopkins as a poet of Nature with reference to God's Grandeur.

Ans. Hopkins is a great poet of Nature. His poetry combines the sensuous appeal of Keats' nature poetry with the spiritual interest of Wordsworth's poetry. As a nature poet, Hopkins was fascinated by those aspects of a thing which constitute the distinctive quality or the essence of a thing. The seizing of the distinctive quality and as far as possible its concrete, sensuous presentation was said by Hopkins to be "what I above all aim at in poetry", and he called it 'inscape'. He gives the name 'instress' to the energy and stress by which he intensifies and communicates his 'inscape'. These two phrases are coined by Hopkins to describe his awareness of a divine pattern and power at work in Nature.

In God's Grandeur, he finds the distinctive quality of Nature's beauty as the manifestation of God's power and grandeur. God's grandeur has powered all things of Nature. There are striking and vivid Nature-images. God's glory shines like a gleam from shaken foil. It is also like the accumulation of oil when olives are crushed. There is the picture of the fading light of the setting sun on the black west and the glorious light of the rising sun 'on the brown brink eastward'. The colour effect is Keatsian. He sees beauty and grandeur of Nature, and through Nature he sees the beauty and grandeur of God. The sunrise is the renewal of Nature, and is the symbol of the spirit of God. The Holy Ghost is the divine spirit representing the creative energy of Nature.

In Pied Beauty he sings glory to God for 'dappled things'. He loves "all things counter, original, spare and strange". The poem is full of ecstatic joy in the richness of Nature and is brilliant with glowing light and colour. God has created 'pied beauty'. As illustrations of the Pied beauty, he makes mention of the sky of couple-colour, fallen chestnuts revealing the reddish-brown nuts, finches' wings, the landscape which looks like a patch work. These dappled things are full of great variety and contrast. They are swift and slow, sweet and sour, bright and dim, fickle and freckled. The poem shows Hopkins' minute observation of Nature and accurate descriptions. The theme of the poem is, however, the glorification of God as revealed in dappled things.