Pied+Beauty+(1877)

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** Pied Beauty (1877) ** **by Gerard Manley Hopkins**

Complete Text
> 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**
 The poem opens with an offering: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” In the next five lines, Hopkins elaborates with examples of what things he means to include under this rubric of “dappled.” He includes the mottled white and blue colors of the sky, the “brinded” (brindled or streaked) hide of a cow, and the patches of contrasting color on a trout. The chestnuts offer a slightly more complex image: When they fall they open to reveal the meaty interior normally concealed by the hard shell; they are compared to the coals in a fire, black on the outside and glowing within. The wings of finches are multicolored, as is a patchwork of farmland in which sections look different according to whether they are planted and green, fallow, or freshly plowed. The final example is of the “trades” and activities of man, with their rich diversity of materials and equipment.

In the final five lines, Hopkins goes on to consider more closely the characteristics of these examples he has given, attaching moral qualities now to the concept of variety and diversity that he has elaborated thus far mostly in terms of physical characteristics. The poem becomes an apology for these unconventional or “strange” things, things that might not normally be valued or thought beautiful. They are all, he avers, creations of God, which, in their multiplicity, point always to the unity and permanence of His power and inspire us to “Praise Him.”

** Form **
This is one of Hopkins’s “curtal” (or curtailed) sonnets, in which he miniaturizes the traditional sonnet form by reducing the eight lines of the octave to six (here two tercets rhyming // ABC ABC //) and shortening the six lines of the sestet to four and a half. This alteration of the sonnet form is quite fitting for a poem advocating originality and contrariness. The strikingly musical repetition of sounds throughout the poem (“dappled,” “stipple,” “tackle,” “fickle,” “freckled,” “adazzle,” for example) enacts the creative act the poem glorifies: the weaving together of diverse things into a pleasing and coherent whole.

**Commentary**
 This poem is a miniature or set-piece, and a kind of ritual observance. It begins and ends with variations on the mottoes of the Jesuit order (“to the greater glory of God” and “praise to God always”), which give it a traditional flavor, tempering the unorthodoxy of its appreciations. The parallelism of the beginning and end correspond to a larger symmetry within the poem: the first part (the shortened octave) begins with God and then moves to praise his creations. The last four-and-a-half lines reverse this movement, beginning with the characteristics of things in the world and then tracing them back to a final affirmation of God. The delay of the verb in this extended sentence makes this return all the more satisfying when it comes; the long and list-like predicate, which captures the multiplicity of the created world, at last yields in the penultimate line to a striking verb of creation (fathers-forth) and then leads us to acknowledge an absolute subject, God the Creator. The poem is thus a hymn of creation, praising God by praising the created world. It expresses the theological position that the great variety in the natural world is a testimony to the perfect unity of God and the infinitude of His creative power. In the context of a Victorian age that valued uniformity, efficiency, and standardization, this theological notion takes on a tone of protest.

Why does Hopkins choose to commend “dappled things” in particular? The first stanza would lead the reader to believe that their significance is an aesthetic one: In showing how contrasts and juxtapositions increase the richness of our surroundings, Hopkins describes variations in color and texture—of the sensory. The mention of the “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls” in the fourth line, however, introduces a moral tenor to the list. Though the description is still physical, the idea of a nugget of goodness imprisoned within a hard exterior invites a consideration of essential // value // in a way that the speckles on a cow, for example, do not. The image transcends the physical, implying how the physical links to the spiritual and meditating on the relationship between body and soul. Lines five and six then serve to connect these musings to human life and activity. Hopkins first introduces a landscape whose characteristics derive from man’s alteration (the fields), and then includes “trades,” “gear,” “tackle,” and “trim” as diverse items that are man-made. But he then goes on to include these things, along with the preceding list, as part of God’s work.

Hopkins does not refer explicitly to human beings themselves, or to the variations that exist among them, in his catalogue of the dappled and diverse. But the next section opens with a list of qualities (“counter, original, spare, strange”) which, though they doggedly refer to “things” rather than people, cannot but be considered in moral terms as well; Hopkins’s own life, and particularly his poetry, had at the time been described in those very terms. With “fickle” and “freckled” in the eighth line, Hopkins introduces a moral and an aesthetic quality, each of which would conventionally convey a negative judgment, in order to fold even the base and the ugly back into his worshipful inventory of God’s gloriously “pied” creation. Thanks to Spark Notes for the above.    ****Question****** s to consider **  [] Hopkins was born in 1844, and died just 45 years later, in 1889, but in this relatively short life he wrote some of the most startling and original poetry of the whole 19th Century. He was a deeply intellectual and religious man, and became a Jesuit priest in 1877, the same year in which he wrote ‘Pied Beauty’.

Throughout his life Hopkins was deeply fond of the countryside and its beauty, in which he could see the work and power of God. In ‘Pied Beauty’ he expresses his delight and astonishment at the sheer diversity of nature.


 * What do the things Hopkins describes have in common?
 * How does Hopkins celebrate diversity?
 * How does the image of the chestnut link the physical with the spiritual world?
 * How is the human world linked to the physical world in the poem?
 * How are both the physical and the human world linked to God?
 * Comment on the following compound nouns /verbs:‘couple-colour’, ‘fresh-firecoal’, fathers-forth’.
 * Comment on the use of sound in the poem and the effect it creates.
 * Comment on the rhythm (metre) of the poem N.B. it is irregular). How does it contribute to its meaning?
 * Annotate the rhyme scheme. What comments can you make on its effect?
 * The poem begins and ends in a symmetrical way. Why? What is the effect of the short final line?
 * In what way are the first and second parts of the poem the reverse of each other?
 * What is the effect of delaying the verb ‘fathers-forth’ to the beginning of the penultimate line?

Examination Question: **How does this poem seek to convey the ‘glory’ and grandeur of God for Hopkins?**         <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Arial,sans-serif; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Lucida Grande',Arial,sans-serif; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;">media type="youtube" key="NUiuOb08PtU?version=3" height="360" width="640"