Gerald Manley Hopkins - God's Grandeur

Hopkins, an ordained Jesuit priest writes of God's grandeur, or grand plan and mystery.
It describes man, "Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; and all is seared with trade; bleated smeared with toil;" He is describing man's desecration of the Earth that God has given us, as a gift. But yet, "and for all this, nature is never spent." Through all the industrialism of the West and going Eastward, humans have not tapped the resource that the earth has to offer. This is, "Because of the Holy Ghost over bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings." He is saying the Holy Ghost is watching over the Earth while we are destroying her, not because we know better or because we have insight like God does, but because the Earth is special and we need to learn to take better care of it, change the paradigm of the industrial age and give back to the Earth, as we have taken so much.

I see a lot of modern Victorian ideals in this poem, religious faith, and the vow to find "God's work in nature" make him a late romantic. He lives during a time like ours, where the world is seeing the repercussions of industrial nations. An Inconvenient Truth is a movie that hits home to a lot of people about Global Warming, and though I feel it is more of a gimmick for Al Gore, it has a good message that people need to see and act upon.