'PIED BEAUTY'- detailed explanation

“Pied Beauty” opens and closes with variants of the two mottoes of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), of which Hopkins was a member. As cited by Peter Milward in A Commentary on the Sonnets of G. M. Hopkins, the two mottoes are: “Ad majorem Dei gloriam (To the greater glory of God) and Laus Deo semper (Praise be to God always).” Milward points out that it is customary for pupils in Jesuit schools to write an abbreviated form of the former motto, A. M. D. G., at the beginning of each written exercise, and the latter motto, L. D. S., at the end. Thus Hopkins appears to be treating his poem as an exercise in the Jesuit tradition.

Line 1 begins a hymn of praise to God for creating “dappled things” that embody the “Pied Beauty” of the title. These are things of mottled or variegated hue that display variety and pairs of opposites (such as light and dark). The whole of stanza 1, the sestet of the curtal sonnet, consists of a number of such things. Line 2 gives two examples of dappled things. In a simile, the poet likens “skies of couple-colour” to a “brinded” or striped cow, since both are of two contrasting colors.

The poet turns his attention to the river, where trout swim, their skins showing rose-colored markings “all in stipple,” meaning spots such as an artist might create by using small touches of the brush, a technique known as stippling. Then the poet draws attention to the windfalls from chestnut trees. When chestnuts hit the ground, their dull brown shells break open to reveal reddish-brown nuts within, which the poet likens in a metaphor to coals that break open in a fire and glow red. He notes the wings of finches, which are of varied colors.

The poet broadens his vision to take in the landscape. This is not an untouched, virgin landscape, but a landscape worked and shaped by man: it is “plotted and pieced,” meaning divided into sections or plots. A “fold” is an enclosure for sheep; “fallow” refers to a field left for a period of rest between crops; and “plough” refers to a field tilled in preparation for crop planting. All these references include, by implication, man’s intervention in the natural landscape. In line 6, the poet draws more direct attention to man, this time in the form of his trades and the clothes and tools associated with them. The trades are spoken of in terms of their neatness and orderliness: “gear and tackle and trim,” with “trim” perhaps suggesting the sailboats of fishermen.

In the quatrain of the curtal sonnet, the poet leaves behind the concrete examples of dappled things of stanza 1. He turns his attention inward, to his reflections on the abstract qualities he admires in “dappled things.” He appreciates their oddness, uniqueness, and rarity, all of which contribute to their preciousness. His use of the words “fickle” and “frecklèd” to describe these things is noteworthy, as these are both qualities that were neither admired nor appreciated in the Victorian age. “Fickle” was most often applied to inconstant lovers (more frequently women) and unstable and capricious people. Many ladies with freckled complexions employed poisons and potions to try to remove the marks and attain the uniformly pale color that was fashionable. The poet’s description of these things as “counter,” as well as meaning contrary to expectation and therefore unusual, suggests an opposition to the mainstream of opinion. The interjection of “who knows how?” adds an element of wonder and mystery.

The poet describes the way in which the dappled things are “fickle, frecklèd”: they embody pairs of opposite or contrasting abstract qualities. Those mentioned are swiftness and slowness, sweet and sour, and brightness and dimness. In conclusion, the poet returns to the theme he introduced in the first line: the creator of all this variety, change, and contrast is God, “whose beauty is past change.” He ends with a simple half-line consisting only of the exhortation, “Praise him.”

“Pied Beauty” is a hymn of praise to the variety of God’s creation, which is contrasted with the unity and non-changing nature of God. This variety is embodied in the “dappled things” of nature, as detailed in the sestet of the curtal sonnet. The significance of these things lies in the union of contrasting or opposite qualities in one being or aspect of creation. Thus bi-colored skies and streaked cows display contrasting hues; the “rose-moles” on the trout stand out against the background color of the skin; finches’ wings have bars of contrasting colors; broken-open chestnuts show a bright color inside against their dull-colored outside; and the worked landscape consists of divisions that separate one part from another.

The “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls” seems to open up a moral and personal aspect to the theme of variety. The idea of the broken-open chestnuts revealing a shining hidden glory within symbolically suggests that a humble, unremarkable, or flawed exterior can conceal a beautiful, divinely inspired soul. This suggestion is picked up by the ambiguous adjectives “fickle, frecklèd,” which are commonly used to describe things of which the Victorian mainstream did not approve, such as inconstant lovers and less-than-flawless complexions. From the point of view of the visual arts (Hopkins was a keen painter), these elements represent asymmetry, or broken symmetry. Whereas an even-colored object or being displays symmetry, a dappled object or being displays asymmetry. In the visual arts, the power of a painting, drawing, or sculpture comes from the interplay between symmetry and broken symmetry. In terms of poetry, this might be expressed in terms of regular rhythm (symmetry) and broken rhythm (asymmetry). In giving thanks to God for “All things counter, original, spare, strange,” Hopkins includes in his hymn of praise people and other beings who are different, unusual, and (figuratively speaking) swimming against the mainstream. It can be no accident that such words were repeatedly applied to Hopkins’s poetry, which was stylistically and thematically so far ahead of its time that readers found it odd, difficult, and even incomprehensible. Hopkins was aware of this, writing in a letter of February 15, 1879, to Robert Bridges (reproduced in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works), “No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness.” In “Pied Beauty,” oddness and contrariness are brought into the fold of God’s diverse creation.

Man and his environment are also unified. The landscape is not one of untouched nature, but one that is formed and shaped by man, to such an extent that it is defined by the activities of man within it: the sheepfold, the land that man has ploughed, and the land that he has left to rest between crops. At a time when the Industrial Revolution was prompting many writers and thinkers to lament the growing gap between man and the countryside, and the consequent destruction of the countryside by the manufacturing activities of man, this poem is a celebration of the oneness between rural man and his land. Hopkins portrays man as just another organic part of God’s creation, enfolded into the landscape, not a force that is destroying that creation. The “trades” that he mentions are not the searing, smearing, and blearing trades of that other poem of 1877, “God’s Grandeur,” but trades that bring man into a cooperative and order-creating relationship with creation, embodied in the neatness of the image, “their gear and tackled and trim.”

Piedness or variety is unified and embodied by each being named in the poem. Thus, though the cow is bi-colored, it is a single being and thereby represents a unity of contrasting elements. There is unity in diversity too in the poet’s juxtaposition of contrasting beings or elements. Thus the solid, familiar form of the cow is set against the unbounded, infinite skies or heavens, just as the various, finite, and ever-changing forms of creation are set against the oneness, infinity, and constancy of God. In the second stanza, the theme is broadened to include abstract qualities that are opposite or contrasting in the same way in which, in the concrete examples of the first stanza, the colors on the cow and the trout are opposite or contrasting. To unify such abstract opposites as swift and slow, bright and dark, is a greater imaginative stretch than envisaging contrasting colors on an object, but such is the momentum of the poem that nothing could seem more natural. The poem concludes with the ultimate expression of piedness: God and his creation, the one and the many. The one and the many, however, are ultimately one, the God that is praised in the extremely simple, disyllabic final line before the poem drops into the silence of contemplation.

"Pied Beauty" is a celebration of natural creation bookended by traditional religious expressions of praise and glorification. It is difficult to infer whether the poem is meant to be a private and personal prayer (it was never published in Hopkins's lifetime), or if the speaker is addressing an imagined audience. The poem was written in 1877, the same year that Hopkins was ordained as a Jesuit priest by one of his heroes, the famous English writer and theologian John Henry Newman. "Pied Beauty" comes near the height of Hopkins's religious fervor.

In Hopkins's poetry, nature does not exist without man. He does not take the view that man exploits nature, but rather Hopkins's landscapes are filled with the tools and marks of humanity just as it is filled with trees in birds. On the other hand, his view of nature, at least in this poem, is limited to the things you might see in the English countryside. The poem is pastoral, meaning it shows natural beauty in an agricultural setting. Humans model their own activities after nature, and the diverse blend of colors and forms in the natural world serves as a metaphor for the diversity of man's trades and crafts.

The speaker admits that he has no idea how the world came to be filled with "dappled things." He can offer no explanation but can only describe and admire. Some religious thinkers would say that nature must be beautiful because it was created by God. Hopkins says that God is praise-worthy because He created such a mysterious and beautiful world. Perhaps there is not a huge distinction between the two views, except one of attitude. Hopkins seems to have an appreciation of natural diversity for its own sake, in all things great and small, and regardless of their relation to human ends. The theme of awe and amazement is thus an important theme in the poem.

Besides this, there is the theme of transience. According to "Pied Beauty," the beauty of the earth is dependent on change. With the help of our microscopes and telescopes, we now know that when you look close enough, both the macro and microscopic appear "dappled." Hopkins sees the same patterns of transient beauty in the greatness of a clouded sky or the smallness of finches' wings. According to the speaker of this poem, God is the only being that does not change. God brings change into the world, like a person who slowly turns a kaleidoscope. Hopkins adopts the Catholic view that God is the only unity in the world – everything else exists in diversity.

There is a lot of alliteration in this poem. The use of different words that begin with the same sound contributes to the idea of unity-in-diversity. It also contributes to the unique, strongly accented sound of the poem:

• Line 1: "Glory" and "God"

• Line 2: "Couple-colour" and "cow"

• Line 4: "Fresh-firecoal" "falls" and "finches'"

• Line 5: "Plotted," "pieced," and "plough"; "fold" and "fallow"

• Line 6: "Trades," "tackle," and "trim"

• Line 7: "Spare" and "strange"

• Line 8: "Fickle" and freckled"

• Line 9: "Swift," "slow," "sweet," and "sour." "Adazzle" and "dim."

• Line 10: "Fathers-forth"

The technique of cramming two words into one hyphenated word like "couple-colour" and "chestnut-falls" is not a recent development. Shakespeare used such words frequently, and so did later Romantics like John Keats. But this technique came to be associated with the innovative sonic experimentation of 20th-century modernism, as expressed in the work of authors like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and others. Because of his innovative technique and use of language, Hopkins is sometimes considered a "modernist" or "proto-modernist" poet. But it doesn't really make sense to call Hopkins a modernist because he wrote his poems well before the turn of the century. He belonged to no established school, and hyphenated words were just one of the tools of his own brand of "sprung rhythm."