The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is often described as an early modern poet ahead of his

Victorian time. This is perhaps why, while he wrote “Pied Beauty” in 1877, in common with most of his
other poetry, it was first published twenty-nine years after his death. It appeared in the first collected
edition of his poems, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges (1918). The poem
subsequently appeared in the second complete edition of Hopkins’s poetry, published in 1930. As of
2006, “Pied Beauty” was available in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine
Phillips (1986).

“Pied Beauty” is one of the first poems that Hopkins wrote in the so-called sprung rhythm that he
evolved, based on the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon and ancient Welsh poetry. His aim was to approximate
the rhythms and style of normal speech, albeit speech infused with a religious ecstasy and enthusiasm
that are characteristics of his poetry. The poem also embodies Hopkins’s innovative use of condensed
syntax and alliteration. It is written in the form of a curtal or shortened sonnet, another of Hopkins’s
stylistic inventions. Thematically, the poem is a simple hymn of praise to God for the “dappled things” of
creation. God is seen as being beyond change but as generating all the variety and opposites that
manifest in the ever-changing world. Hopkins is best known as a nature poet and a religious poet, and
“Pied Beauty” perfectly exemplifies both these aspects of his work.

Themes and Meanings

(CRITICAL GUIDE TO POETRY FOR STUDENTS)

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In Hopkins’s poetry it is virtually impossible to separate device and form from meaning since he is
constantly at work molding lines, words, and sounds to create an intricate pattern, making one feel that
the poem one is reading is nearly a synesthetic version of the aspect of creation or theology on which he
is commenting. Thus this analysis of theme may seem somewhat repetitive of comment on forms and
devices. In effect, that is part of the point of the poem.

“Pied Beauty” is essentially a list reminding us again and again, in a variety of ways, that the visible
universe and human creation is varied and beautiful even in its ugliness and contrast, and all is a hymn
of praise to God the Creator. In this list, Hopkins isolates details that reveal his perceptiveness as a poet
and that invite the reader to see the world and word anew and more carefully. Thus the strategy of the
poem’s first part is that of enumerating unique details conveyed in unusual words, such as “stipple” or
“brinded.” Each detail is like the brush stroke of a great painter, and for Hopkins, God is the careful
painter mixing and matching, putting all into a whole. Though individual details are striking, unusual,
unique, or even initially ugly, the overall effect is one of massive pattern, reiterated by the echo of the
word “all” at the end of one stanza and beginning of the next.
God’s Creation is beautiful because the seeming variety and contrast conceals a principle of unity that
links all living things to one another and to God—sky to earth, fish to cow, the dying embers of a fire to
the fall of a chestnut from a tree. Though most of the first examples come from nature, and even the
first human examples of pied beauty are from agriculture, Hopkins finds beauty also in mercantile
work—in all the trades, often despised by other religious writers for being nonspiritual, and even in the
equipment used in trade. Perhaps one can also see that the “tackle” used to catch the trout is as
beautiful as the trout itself—and beautiful by contrast.

In Hopkins’s vision, God is the creator of beauty, traditionally the father, the divine spark. He is “past
change” in that he is eternal, omniscient, a fixed and absolute entity. He encompasses the variegated
creation simply as mention of him both begins and ends the poem.

Hopkins remarks upon this beauty, announces it, embodies it in the intricate interwoven complexity of
his words, but he does not purport to understand it. The mystery of how the variegation occurs and how
or why it is beautiful is announced in the very conversational, almost nonpoetic “who knows how?”—a
rhetorical question of amazing power and honesty.

“Pied Beauty” is an ironic paean to God for not creating a perfect universe, but for creating one that is
beautiful because of apparent imperfection. The odd locutions and abrupt stuntedness of the poem
itself embody the pied quality Hopkins discerns in the external world.

Themes

(POETRY FOR STUDENTS)

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Nature’s Variety and God’s Unity

“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 rhymed “curtal” (shortened) sonnet divided into two stanzas, consisting of three full
tercets and a truncated fourth. The title refers to the variegated beauty of the world that first may
appear ugly or chaotic. Though “pied” suggests at least two tones or colors, it also suggests a blotched
or botched effect, as when in an earlier era, a printer spilled a galley of set type, creating a printer’s
“pie.”

Though traditional sonnets are fourteen lines, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his experiments with poetic
form, line, and meter, altered the shape of the sonnet. In the case of “Pied Beauty,” he “curtailed” or
shortened the sonnet’s traditional fourteen lines to eleven; in some other cases, he lengthened the form
and wrote sonnets “with codas,” or tails.

The poem celebrates God for the beauty in a varied creation. Hopkins, a devout Jesuit priest, isolates a
number of instances of this “pied” or dappled beauty in the first stanza (lines 1-6). He finds it in two-
toned skies as well as on cows, on spotted trout, and on the wings of birds. He also sees variety and
unity in the contrasts between all these life-forms, for he sees echoes of plants on fish—“rose-
molesupon trout,” echoes of the dying embers of fires in the chestnuts falling from the tree.

In fact, the first stanza catalogs God’s infinite variety in creation in instances that symbolize all life as
well as inanimate forms, from the heavens to the seas, from plants to animals, from animals finally even
to humans. The fifth line observes the pied quality of the landscape as humans have altered it. The
landscape is a pied checkerboard with pens for animals (such as sheepfolds), plowed fields, and those
fields lying unplowed (fallow). The human pied effect on land is then juxtaposed against the variety of
human mercantile activity or trades.
As in most sonnets, the second part or stanza generalizes, summarizes, or abstracts from the particular
details observed by the poet in the first part. Therefore, the next three lines (lines 7-9) point out the
general patterns of contrast. The word “counter” suggests this contrariness: The beauty of God’s
creation grows out of oppositions. Many of the adjectives—such as “fickle”—Hopkins uses to describe
the pied beauty may seem in themselves unappealing or ugly. “Fickle” usually connotes unpredictability,
disloyalty, perhaps even immorality. In the context of a vast creation, however, these strange, pied
qualities are amalgamated to the overall beauty. The ninth line itself reiterates this effect of balanced
and beautiful contrast in a series of paired oppositions. Having described the pied beauty of the Creation
in the first nine lines, or first three tercets, Hopkins turns to the Creator or “father” (God) in the last two
lines and concludes by directing the reader to “Praise him.”

Forms and Devices

(CRITICAL GUIDE TO POETRY FOR STUDENTS)

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Characteristic of Hopkins is his use of a variety of intricate sound devices, each heightened or altered in
some untraditional way. Hopkins’s idiosyncratic and innovative techniques perhaps explain why the
majority of his poems were published only in the first decades of the twentieth century, nearly thirty
years after his death. “Pied Beauty” consists of patterns of such idiosyncracy in its alliteration,
assonance, neologism, archaism, end rhyme, and rhythm. All these patterns interconnect and contrast
with one another so that the poem itself is an example of “pied” beauty, or mixed elements.

Thus the alliterative g sounds of the first line (“GloryGod”) give way to the l sound, which echoes in
“dappled,” “couple,” “colour,” “moles,” and “stipple,” interconnecting the patterns of the first three
lines with the entire first stanza. The alliterative pattern of sounds connects the “couple-colour” of the
sky to the skin of the “cow.” The c sounds are thus “pied” or combined in contrast with the l sounds.

At first glance, a word such as “rose-moles” seems both odd and hard to pronounce because the
assonance of the o sounds contrasts with the following consonants of s and l. It is a near rhyme or off-
rhyme that occasionally turns a Hopkins lyric into a near tongue twister. Even a sympathetic reader may
wonder what a rose-mole is, for it is indeed one of Hopkins’s neologisms (or invented words) to describe
the colored pattern of a trout’s skin. It is not surprising that in the same line he employs the archaism
“brinded” to described a pied pattern of grey flecks or streaks on a cow’s hide. Also, normal associations
with rose, usually an image of perfection or beauty, contrast radically with traditional associations with
mole, usually seen as a beauty defect or unpleasant growth. Yet the phrase, the sound, the very
unusualness of the concept suggest the exciting variety of a universe constantly changing and
contrasting.

In addition, the structure of the poem is itself an example of pied beauty, since the expected patterns
established by the rhyme schemes of the first six lines (abcabc) are broken in the next five (dbcdc). The
poem’s tercet pattern ends abruptly in a line and a half (lines 10 and 11) instead of three full lines. This
last shift marks the radical difference between God’s creation and God. Hopkins thus dramatically
reminds one that God, unlike the dappled things, is powerful and unchanging and has a beauty of
oneness or integrity. He also simultaneously shows one that the relation of God (unchanging) to his
Creation (fickle, changing) is itself an example of pied or mixed, contrasting beauty.

The abrupt ending also forces the last two words (“Praise him”) to bear enormous weight; because of
the established pentameter rhythm of the preceding lines, they enjoy the supposed five-beat stress
typical of that pattern. This makes those two words both momentous and simultaneously humble, like a
quiet prayer.

The stunted end is what makes this a “curtal” or curtailed sonnet. One misses the patterned, traditional
beauty of a fourteen-line sonnet but finds instead another beauty in an odd form Hopkins created
particularly for this occasion.