A Poem Conversation

The poems “Design” by Robert Frost and “God's Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins seem to be sharing some similarities: talking about the environment and the nature. But are these two really sharing the same points of view? To distinguish the difference, one can juxtapose the two poems to see what Frost and Hopkins have written for the readers.

In “God's Grandeur,” Hopkins explains the beauty of the world by presenting God and how the Holy Ghost looks upon the world in its arms. Frost gives a very vivid image of the “fat and white” spider. It is as if Frost's sonnet gives more details of what Hopkins wanted to show to the audience. For instance, Hopkins says how the world “gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil; Crushed” as Frost describes the small things, such as the spider and the moth that are as small as the seeds for the oil, is what the world is made out of. This example can be read in vice versa: As Frost tells what one small creature does, Hopkins lead the readers to the idea that the world is full of small activities yet big when they are seen as a whole.

The sonnets also share a similar characteristic of the nature: instinct to survive. Both of them tribute how different animals in different environment try to survive in their special ways. Just like how the spider would catch the moth in its web and feast on it, Hopkins describe how the human beings survive with the nature's resources. Frost and Hopkins are saying that these two animals, no matter how these two creatures look unlike or what each one does to survive, they both share the fact on how to find their necessities to live by coexisting with the nature.

Yet among the similar ideas, both sonnets tend to go on opposite directions. In Frost's sonnet, the spider is “fat and white” that killed a moth that was “like a white piece of rigid satin cloth.” Throughout the whole sonnet, Frost describes how a beautiful colored spider eats the weak light moth that was defenseless. It's a natural habit for the spiders to eat other insect species in order to survive. But the first impression that the reader gets is the grossness and disgust. Natural as it is, the spider is portrayed to be carnivorous. It is not so easy for all of people to enjoy watching a scene like that.

Hopkins' sonnet takes the other way around. As written in his sonnet, he wrote that the world “wears man's smudge and shares man's smell.” But is it really natural for the nature to have human smell to them? Although it seems wrong for the humans to destroy the nature that is “charged with the grandeur of God,” one can easily say that it doesn't seem too wrong because the humans are trying to survive, just like the spider from Frost's sonnet. This point of view can be taken as granted because people are adapted to this kind of environment.

Spider eating moth or humans walking over the nature, which one would you think it's more crucial? As for me, both of them are all natural no matter how one looks wrong than the other.