Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins (Poem, Summary & Analysis)

 

Pied Beauty

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

(Poem, Summary & Analysis)

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody – particularly his concept of sprung rhythm – established him as an innovative writer of verse, as did his technique of praising God through vivid use of imagery and nature. Only after his death did Robert Bridges begin to publish a few of Hopkins's mature poems in anthologies, hoping to prepare the way for wider acceptance of his style. By 1930 his work was recognized as one of the most original literary accomplishments of his century. It had a marked influence on such leading 20th-century poets as T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

Praise Him.

Summary

‘Pied Beauty’ is a curtal sonnet, that is, a sonnet which has less than fourteen lines. It has ten and a half lines in all. Hopkins wrote only two curtal sonnets, the other being ‘Peace’. Here the main qualities of a sonnet are retained, but in a circumscribed manner.

The theme of the poem is the praise and glorification of God for creating various multi-colored, multi-shaped and multi-natured things in this world. The poet begins the poem by this praise. He says “Glory be to God for dappled things”. The God has given us dappled, spotted, freckled, checkered, speckled, things. The speaker goes on to give examples. We should praise God because of the skies with two colors, like a two-colored cow. And the little reddish dots on the side of trout. And the way fallen chestnuts look like red coals in a fire. And the blended colors of the wings of a finch. And landscapes divided up by humans into plots for farming. And for all the different jobs that humans do.

In short, the speaker thinks we should praise God for everything that looks a bit odd or unique, everything that looks like it doesn't quite fit in with the rest. The poet praises God for creating all fish and fowl, men and animals. It is from God that all animate and inanimate objects take life. Hopkins gives a catalogue of all the things created by God for which praise be His. Beginning with praise, the poem builds up through a description of a variety of beautiful things which either are pied or contain opposites of various kinds – colour, taste, speed, brightness- to an assertion of the Creator of them, whose ability to comprehend the paradoxes within his unity aptly demand praise. The speaker sums up what he believes should be our attitude in a brief, final line: "Praise Him."

Analysis

Pied Beauty is a ‘curtail sonnet’ a sonnet curtailed in length. Instead of having the traditional fourteen lines, it consists of ten and a half lines. Hopkins used this curtal form only in two of his poems, in the present poem and in ‘Peace’. The curtal form was an invention of Hopkins. He retains all the essential characteristics of a sonnet- it has an octave and a sestet. The Octave consists of the first six lines while the last four and a half lines form the sestet. The metre of this poem is ‘sprung paeonic.’ A paeonic foot has one stressed and three unstressed syllables. The religious fervor of the poems is remarkable. Hopkins praises God for brindled cows and the blacksmith’s anvil as well as for the so-called poetic objects around him.

While writing the poems, God was always supreme in the mind of Hopkins. For Hopkins God is apart from Nature, God is an artist, the Master-creator of beauty. The beauty, of created things, is a message from God, that behind ‘Pied Beauty’, varied and shifting, is the creator, changeless, eternal, One. The poem expresses the poets’ joyous wonder at the beauty of the work, of a joy enhanced because creation is seen sacramentally and because he himself is using beauty to praise his Maker. The beauty of created things, including the beauty of Nature is not permanent, but only by knowing transient beauty in the many, can the heart grasp the ‘Immutable Beauty’ of God. God is Beauty in itself. So, praise Him; let it be our duty and our delight.

Hopkins catalogues things which change form moment to moment, form season to season: the changing patterns of the sky, the contrast between the rich, red-brown nut of the fallen chestnut and the green husk or case which encloses it; the patchwork of landscape changing according to time and place; the green pasture-land, the dull fawn-brown fallow lands, the deep brown ploughed lands; the different implements of artisans and workmen; he catalogues them all. Then he generalizes, contrasting the antithesis of life, things set in opposition. All these things are products of God. Yet God Himself is above change. He creates, but He is not the same as His creations. These things praise Him; are meant to praise Him.

In this poem, Hopkins’ feelings are stirred by thought of earthly occupation: he is aware of the sweet-sour tastes of life. The compound-words, like ‘Fresh fire coal, Chestnut-falls, are full of force and meaning. The poem is a good example of the violence to syntax and grammar. The poem is full of image to give an idea of the variety and ‘dapple’ of the world, giving experiences of inscape in nature.

Like Milton who rose to greatness by writing poetry to vindicate the ways of God to men’, Hopkins, by nature a dreamer and a sensualist, only raises himself to greatness by writing poetry for ‘great causes as liberty and religion’. In doing this, he had to sublimate his poetic power. There is sensualism in the poem; there is no asceticism. It is a tribute to God’s glory.