Poetry and Prayer
Though Hopkins referred to the poem as a sonnet, the most substantial formal influence on display in “Pied Beauty” is the hymn. The anaphora (repeated use of ‘for’ at the beginning of lines, for example), paratactic syntax—often more or less listing nouns and adjectives—as well as, most obviously, the invocation at the beginning, all bear a clear debt to the style and form of the Bible. Even the way the lines are arranged on the page, divided up into units marked by series of indented lines, is drawn from the book of Psalms, and the positioning of the final words “Praise Him” recalls the traditional placement of a concluding ‘amen.’
Beauty
In addition to a paean to the beauty of a particular scene of a natural (though partially man-made) environment, “Pied Beauty” is also an investigation of the nature and meaning of beauty itself. Rather strikingly, instead of emphasizing harmony, unity, wholeness, and so on, as does much nature poetry, Hopkins specifically directs his praise to “All things counter, original, spare, strange.” Thus one way of understanding “Pied Beauty” is as a statement of Hopkins’s own aesthetic, as well as an attempt to integrate that aesthetic into his faith.
Harmony vs. Order
In addition to being a poet and an ordained priest, Hopkins was a composer with a highly developed musical sensibility, and his understanding of music had a profound influence on his poetry (Graves, pp. 146–55). We can see this influence at work in “Pied Beauty,” where Hopkins recasts the traditional understanding of God’s design as a kind of order (see Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man” for a satirical take on this conception of the “Great Chain of Being”). This idea, which has a long tradition in Biblical hermeneutics, emphasizes hierarchy, correspondence, similarity and other forms of direct, static relationships as the elements of God’s design. Hopkins develops, by contrast, what we might call a more musical concept of divine design, in which a variety of distinct notes, points and counter-points, compose a harmony that varies, develops, and changes in and through time, even as the beauty of God himself remains “beyond change.”
