PIED BEAUTY - Gerard Manley Hopkins
PIED BEAUTY
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
INTRODUCTION
Gerard Manley Hopkins, (1844-1889) English poet and Jesuit priest, one of the
most individual of Victorian writers. His work was not published in collected
form until 1918, but it influenced many leading 20th-century poets. He broke his seven-year silence to write the long
poem The Wreck of the Deutschland, which is about the death of five Franciscan
nuns in a shipwreck in 1875.
POEM
JUSTIFICATION
“Pied Beauty” As a Praise to God: As this poem is about the celebration of
various things created by God, the speaker praises God for
creating spotted and dappled things. He comments on the changeable nature of
the world and argues that everything
in the universe is destined to alter except God’s beauty.
INSCAPE
OF LIVING AND NON-LIVING THINGS
“For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;”
The poem ‘Pied Beauty ‘opens with an
offering: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” In the next five lines, Hopkins
elaborates with examples of what things he means to include under this rubric
of “dappled.” He includes the mottled white and blue colors of the sky, the
“brinded” (brindled or streaked) hide of a cow, and the patches of contrasting
color on a trout. The chestnuts offer a slightly more complex image: When they
fall they open to reveal the meaty interior normally concealed by the hard
shell; they are compared to the coals in a fire, black on the outside and
glowing within. The wings of finches are multicolored, as is a patchwork of
farmland in which sections look different according to whether they are planted
and green, fallow, or freshly plowed. The final example is of the “trades” and
activities of man, with their rich diversity of materials and equipment.
STRANGE
AND UNUSUAL THINGS
“All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; a dazzle, dim;”
Hopkins goes on to consider more closely the
characteristics of these examples he has given, attaching moral qualities now
to the concept of variety and diversity that he has elaborated thus far mostly
in terms of physical characteristics. The poem becomes an apology for these
unconventional or “strange” things, things that might not normally be valued or
thought beautiful. They are all, he avers, creations of God, which, in their
multiplicity, point always to the unity and permanence of His power and inspire
us to “Praise Him.”
FORM &STRUCTURE
This is one of Hopkins’s “curtal”or curtailed sonnets, in which
he miniaturizes the traditional sonnet form by reducing the eight lines of the
octave to six (here two tercets rhyming ABC ABC) and
shortening the six lines of the sestet to four and a half. This alteration of
the sonnet form is quite fitting for a poem advocating originality and
contrariness. The strikingly musical repetition of sounds throughout the poem
(“dappled,” “stipple,” “tackle,” “fickle,” “freckled,” “adazzle,” for example)
enacts the creative act the poem glorifies: the weaving together of diverse
things into a pleasing and coherent whole.
BRIEFNESS OF NATURE AND ETERNITY OF GOD
The writer has incorporated these ideas
with classical diction and literary elements. He
begins his poem by praising God for creating colorful and multiple things in
nature and then provides a list. His discussion about nature and God’s creation
reflects that every entity present in the universe is beautiful in its own way.
Therefore, he praises God and invites readers to praise him.
CONCLUSION
Thus,
Hopkins praises God for dappled,
or spotted, things. This is a unique idea, as humans tend to both seek
and praise perfection and also it focuses on things in nature that have distinct patterning and unusual design and
compares and contrasts differences or similarities. The idea that a
perfect God could delight in the imperfections of his creation gives us pause.
Comments