Title: “God’s Grandeur” might be a poem about God, and his power.
Paraphrase: The world is filled with God’s greatness and power, one day it will go out like a light. It gathers to a high point, and is then crushed. Why then do people not care about His authority; His wrath. Generations after generations have carried on in this depressing manner. Everything is ruined by trade; everything is blurry, being smeared by laborious work. Everything now is covered with the things people have done wrong: the soil is bare and your bare foot cannot feel the ground anymore because it is cloaked in wrong-doing. And even after all this, nature is not done for. Underneath all of that human-inspired filth is a sincere freshness. And even though the daylight will set in the west, it will rise again in the east, for morning; this is so because God will watch over us with love and care.
Connotations: In the very first line, and throughout the entire poem, the most noticeable thing is rhyme and repetition. “grandeur of God” “Shining from shook” “gathers to a greatness” “ooze of oil” “now not” “reck his rod” “foot feel” “nature is never” “deep down” “last lights” “west went” “brown brink” “broods with warm breasts and with…bright wings” all of these are examples of alliteration. It follows an ABBAABBA in the first stanza and then CDCDCD in the second. However other rhyming takes place within the poem “men then” and “seared with trade; bleared, smeared” are examples of this internal masculine rime. Repetition of the word “trod”, and overall repetition of a consonant sound in the line “wears man 's smudge and shares man 's smell: the soil”. And of course, the entire poem is a biblical reference to God, and the Holy Spirit.
Shifts: It shifts in the first stanza in the fourth line as it asks “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” Before this point the speaker was just talking about the Earth and God and his greatness and how it will one day be