The Downside
The first stanza of the poem can be a bit of a downer. Luckily, the problems seem to lie of the surface of the earth, and the surface of the people who live on it. Line 5: The repetition of "trod"...
Hope
English poet Alexander Pope said, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." Our speaker might not quite agree precisely with Pope, but he is still a fairly hopeful person. Hope is found in the pa...
Industry
Hopkins probably wrote the poem in the late 1800s. Industrialization was going strong, but was nothing like what we see today. Like American poet, Walt Whitman, a favorite of his, Hopkins placed gr...