Pied Beauty: a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) is a prime example of two of that poet’s most innovative characteristics, namely the “curtal sonnet” and “sprung rhythm”. It is one of his most popular poems today although, like nearly all his output, it was unknown by the general public for many years after the time of its writing.

The poem was written during the late summer of 1877 when Hopkins was studying theology at St Bueno’s College in rural North Wales. In 1875 he had been inspired to resume his poetry writing after a gap of seven years, and the two years before he was ordained as a Catholic priest in September 1877 were among his most productive, with a third of all his mature poems being written at this time. “Pied Beauty” is typical of this group of poems, being both religious in tone and inspired by the beautiful countryside that surrounded the college.

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 all trades, 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.

The curtal sonnet

The curtal sonnet was an experimental poetic form that compressed the traditional sonnet of fourteen lines, divided between octave and sestet, to ten and a half lines in which there is a first section of six lines and a second section of four and a half lines. However, the final half line in “Pied Beauty” contains only two syllables. The rhyme scheme is ABCABC DBCDC.

Sprung rhythm

The idea behind “sprung rhythm” is that the lines contain a consistent number of stresses but not necessarily the same number of syllables. However, the beat of the line should be regular when it is read, which means that the intervening syllables should be read faster or slower to make this possible. It is similar in thought to how a piece of music might be played if the bars in a line contained a mixture of, say, two three and four notes but with their values made to fit a rigid time signature.

The overall effect is a jerky one. It appears that by “sprung” Hopkins had in mind a deer running down a hill in a wood so that, although its speed was the same throughout, its feet would adjust to take longer or shorter paces as dictated by the obstacles on the ground.

First section

The opening line sets both theme and mood: “Glory be to God for dappled things”. It is immediately apparent that this is both a religious and a nature poem. The next three lines present examples of things that are “dappled”, or two-toned in nature, and Hopkins uses “two-toned” words in his descriptions, hence “couple-colour”, “rose-moles” and “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls”.

These lines are testament to Hopkins’s close observation of the world about him, such as the fact that the rosy spots on a trout are only visible on a live fish and fade when it dies. Chestnuts, when they fall, have bright red spots that make them look pieces of coal in a fire.

The fifth line takes the eye outward to look at the farmland with its patchwork of different colours and textures depending on the state of the adjoining small fields: “fold, fallow or plough”. This half-line is matched immediately by the description of the trades undertaken by the permanent residents of the college (which was run like a monastic institution): “their gear and tackle and trim”. These triple-stressed half-lines provide a good example of how sprung rhythm is intended to work in that, despite their dissimilar number of syllables, they should take the same time to read aloud.

Second section

The second part of the poem moves from description to message, with the subject of the extended sentence (“He”) only appearing in the final full line. The message is that everything that is changeable, whether in nature or humanity, is God-created and therefore God-sanctioned, although God’s “beauty is past change”.

The message is therefore that one should welcome, and not fear, the opposites that life presents. These are presented as three pairs of words :”… swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim”, in which the stresses fall on the first of each pair and therefore give them a positive impetus to contrast with their unstressed, negative, opposite. However, the paradox offered by Hopkins is that each positive is only made so because the negative exists. There is only good in the world because it is not evil, and evil is necessary in order to define good.

How can the poem best be appreciated?

It should be remembered this this poem was written only days before the poet was to become a priest, an event that was the culmination of three years of study as a Jesuit Catholic. It can therefore be seen as a summary of those years and it is as though Hopkins was giving, in verse, his first sermon as a priest. The final line (“Praise Him”) is addressed to an unseen congregation as an invitation to do so because God continues to create (“fathers-forth”) a world full of opposites and apparent paradoxes because he can do other and for a definite purpose, which is to make human life complete.

This completion can be interpreted in many ways, such as the necessary coming together of male and female for human procreation, a Yeatsian summoning of one’s opposite, or merely delighting in the appreciation of the variety of the natural world as typified by the opening lines of the poem.

“Pied Beauty” can also be read as a counterblast to the mind-numbing uniformity of much of Victorian life, in which millions of people were condemned to lead parallel, unvarying lives as manual workers in factories and other workplaces, and in which everyone was expected to follow the same set of moral guidelines as laid down by a censorious protestant Church of England. Hopkins, having escaped from that straightjacket to become a Catholic, is championing eccentricity as a means of freeing and developing the human spirit.

Whether or not one takes on board the theological message of “Pied Beauty”, it is a highly original and effective poem from which most people can take something of value.