Summary
“Pied Beauty” is a religious nature lyric that takes the form of a “curtal sonnet,” one of several poetic forms invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poem is divided into two sections and is thirteen lines (or, on one view, twelve-and-a-half) lines total, with the first section composed of two tercets with the rhyme scheme ABCABC; the second less traditionally structured, though still adhering to a definite rhyme scheme, linked to the first (DBCDC).
Hopkins’ opening line frames the poem to follow as a paean to God’s creations. Its language and basic structure call to mind the widely known Psalm 148, which is built (in the New International translation of the Bible) around the refrain which with Hopkins ends his poem: “praise him.”
In effect, “Pied Beauty” treats the natural world observed by the poet as a kind of text, with the poem itself constituting a reading of that text that both reveals and glorifies its author, God. Yet while religious verse and other texts of this form generally emphasize the unity and order of God’s design, “Pied Beauty” revels in its variety, its unpredictability.
In place of some grand, overarching schema, in “Pied Beauty” Hopkins turns his attention to “All things counter, original, spare, strange” (7). In its meticulously observed detail, the poem to some extent overwhelms the reader as it leaps from image to image at breakneck pace. What unifies the poem, besides its formal structure, is the powerful sense of exhilaration of the poet’s discovery, at every turn, not of further evidence of a pre-ordained design, but of new, unique, beautiful, and surprising phenomena that contrast with, compliment, and echo one another all at the same time.
Analysis
The vividness of the imagery in “Pied Beauty” and the palpable religious fervor that animates it can easily distract the reader from the more subtle, formal elements of Hopkins' art, but ultimately it is these elements upon which the power of the poem rests. Hopkins is perhaps best known and admired (at least among modern poets) for his innovations in prosody, in particular his identification and development of a metrical pattern he called “sprung rhythm” (for more on this, as well as further elaboration of Hopkins experiments with rhythm and meter see the Special Topics section).
Though not a consistent example of “sprung rhythm,” the meter of “Pied Beauty” makes use of many of the effects of the form. Most striking on a first reading is its sharp break, almost an inversion, of iambic verse, which was widely considered the meter that best approximated natural human speech. While “feet” of verse such as iambic pentameter fall more or less regularly into a pattern of pairs of unstressed-stressed syllables, “Pied Beauty” follows roughly an opposite pattern. The phrase “Glory be to God for dappled things,” for example, is best read as, roughly, Glor-y be to God for dap-pled things, though obviously other variations are possible.
This unit (stressed-unstressed) is known as a trochee, and many consider trochaic meter “faster” than the more common iambic. In “Pied Beauty” specifically, Hopkins' heavy use of trochaic meter serves to emphasize his equally heavy use of alliteration, i.e., the repetition of similar or identical consonants at the beginning of words. Once one begins to attend to it, the intricate precision of Hopkins alliteration, complimented by consonance (a closely related term referring to the repetition of consonant sounds within words) in “Pied Beauty” is, to put it mildly, striking.
Take lines 4-6 for example (though every line in the poem is equally rich): “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings; / Landscapes plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plow; / And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.” Though “f” is clearly the dominant sound in the fourth line (note that “finches” and “firecoal” are trochees), and “p” in the fifth, “f” also reemerges quite forcefully in the latter half of the fifth line, an effect made all the more powerful by the dissonance between the paratactic syntax of the latter phrase and the previous lines’ sense of surging speed. This dazzling array of proliferating and increasingly intricate patterns of sound and rhythm overwhelm us, the reader, even as they compel our most careful attention, mirroring the poet’s own experience of the endlessly various and manifold beauty of God’s creations.
Ultimately it is this careful, loving attention to both the world the poet observes and to the texture of his writing itself, the specificity of his details and the striking quality of his adjectives, that binds the poem together. “Pied Beauty” has no narrative, no logic or argument in the traditional sense, and arguably no coherent lyric subjectivity, no singular “I.” Instead, it means to offer up the world observed by Hopkins for us to read as well, as though alongside the poet, with the hope that by the end we will join him in the move from reading to speaking in its final line.
