Glory be to God for dappled things / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow
The poem starts with an appearance of Christian modesty, notwithstanding "God's Grandeur." The first line indicates that the poem will be a "hymn to creation," propelled by the Biblical Psalms. After the first line, "Pied Beauty" transforms into a nature lyric—a noteworthy departure from the Psalms in the Bible. Although it’s common for Christian devotional literature and song to invoke the beauty of the natural world, such literature's rhetorical approach generally emphasizes the grand, overarching order of God’s design, which stands in contrast to the insistence on particularity we find in “Pied Beauty.”
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
These lines are an excellent example of how Hopkins uses sound and rhythm to both complicate and emphasize the thematic content of “Pied Beauty.” On first reading, the most striking effect is the heavy alliteration: the “p” of “plotted,” “pieced,” and “plough,” as well as the “f” of “fold” and “fallow.” But there are also more nuanced sonic and metrical patterns at play here: “landscape,” for example, contains nearly all the significant consonant sounds in the line. The “l” ties it to “fold” and “fallow,” while “p” near the end knits together “plotted” and "pieced," along with the final “plough.” It even contains that repeated “and” in its entirety. The meter is difficult, almost choppy, and the dash in the middle of the line creates a caesura that divides it into two sections. While differing in the number of unstressed syllables (3 vs. 2, respectively), both halves of the line contain 3 stressed syllables and both end with two unstressed syllables leading into a stressed one. Thus in its very form “Pied Beauty” enacts the kind of complex relationship between variation, imbalance, harmony, and beauty that the poem attempts to describe.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
This line is as close to an explicit statement of the particular aesthetic and religious sentiment of “Pied Beauty” as the poem offers. The adjective "counter," in particular, should strike us as strange in a poem ostensibly concerned with extolling an overarching divine design. Understanding Hopkins’s meaning here requires attending carefully to the variety of senses of each of the words he chooses. We might take "counter," for example, in the sense of ‘counter-argument’ or the musical term ‘counterpoint.’ Likewise, "original" has connotations of generativeness (as in “originate”); "spare" can refer to a particularly refined or restrained beauty; and "strange" phenomena represent, in a sense, an opportunity to revise our received understanding, as our inability to place them challenges us to find a new way of seeing.
