Pied Beauty

One of the difficulties of Hopkins’s life was his inability to combine his love for God with his desire to create and share poetry. Despite Hopkins’s fear that his poetry detracted from his devotion to God, “Pied Beauty” relies on poetic language and imagistic focuses to explain God’s Constancy. The poem begins with “Glory be to God for dappled things” (Line 1) and ends with “Praise him” (Line 11). God is at the beginning and end of the poem, a reference to the biblical quote, from Revelation 22:13, in which God states: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Technically, Hopkins chooses this placement with purpose: To expand his devotion to God, he places the Creator at the start and end of the poem, along with directives reminding the reader to glorify Him, which develops the theme of Praising God: Creator and Creation.

Hopkins’s devotion to God and his poeticizing of the natural world were two of his lifetime pursuits. The poem’s first stanza focuses on an alliterative description of the natural world, beginning with, “For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim” (Lines 2-3). Hopkins describes a two-toned sky and spotted trout, two examples of “pied” beauties. Then, he goes on to provide other examples of unusual, imperfect natural beauties: “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; / Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; / And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim” (Lines 4-6). With a rhyme scheme of abcabc dbcdc, Hopkins imbibes the poem with a naturally-timed rhythm, formally reiterating the poem’s thematic focus on Variation in Nature. Hopkins stresses the “pied” aspects of natural beauty to emphasize God’s own constant perfection by contrast. While God’s creations are ever-changing and various, God is omnipresent and unchanging.

The turn at the start of the second stanza moves the poem from its focus on descriptions of natural imagery to a more expansive vantage point: “All things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)” (Lines 7-8). Hopkins first establishes that God did not just create beautiful aspects of nature, rather He created “All things” (Line 7), including “pied” beauties and other landscapes, people, and animals that can be considered “original” (Line 7), “strange” (Line 7), or “fickle” (Line 8). Despite God’s personal omnipresence and overwhelming beauty, He creates a variety of things that differ in their longevity and aesthetic natures. Hopkins reiterates this thought immediately with a question, given as an aside in parentheses: “who knows how?” (Line 8). This question, or conundrum, indicates that God’s power is beyond human understanding (who) and His power is all-encompassing, greater than his creations can imagine; no one else could create as he does (how).

Next, Hopkins uses adjectives to explain God’s lack of limitation: “With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; / He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change” (Lines 9-10). These descriptions attempt to answer the question of how God creates. All things—“original” (Line 7), “strange” (7), and “fickle” (Line 8)—speak to the glory of God and his power to create. He is all-knowing, but His human creations cannot fully understand Him. Because of that, the speaker can only “Praise him” (Line 11), calling for others to do the same.