An Answer to Dover Beach

My friend Sarah and I have been looking for some time for poetic answer to Arnold's "Dover Beach." I think I may have found one -- "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The poems were written in the late 19th century, within 10 years of each other, though Hopkins' work wasn't published until the end of World War I. Both express a sense of despair at the decline of Christianity and Western civilization. The church seemed to be crumbling before the assaults of liberalism and materialism. Europe and America were still reeling from the first modern wars -- hence Arnold's reference to "ignorant armies."

Arnold, not a Christian, laments what he saw as the passing of Christianity and with it the death of everything that was good and beautiful in the world. Hopkins shares much of Arnold's assessment but not his lack of hope. He finds comfort in the conviction that God continues to look after his world and that, however dark things become, morning is coming -- and the making of all things new.

As an aside, I've long been puzzled by one aspect of Hopkins' complaint: "And all is seared with trade..." Why does he single out trade as a leading cause of the world's degradation? In the absence of compulsion, trade necessarily increases the welfare of both parties -- otherwise it would never occur. Without trade, human poverty would be unimaginably worse than it is.

Hopkins' description of the world as "bent" is singularly apt. Creation "wears man's smudge and shares man's smell" because it was subjected to frustration -- trade is not the source of the problem.