Pied Beauty
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

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 áll trádes, 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.

Hopkins wrote “Pied Beauty” in 1877, when he was 34 years old. It was published—along with most of Hopkins’ other poetry—in 1918, long after his death. The poem is one of Hopkins’ most anthologized, and no wonder—it is quintessential Hopkins in language and theme, and, as far as Hopkins goes, it’s an “easy” one!
 
“Pied Beauty.” The word “pied” is not in everyday usage. It means having two or more colors. Probably the most familiar use of the word for modern readers is in reference to the “pied piper”—who is “pied” because of his multicolored costume. We tend to think of beauty in terms of harmony, balance, and symmetry—but even from the title of the poem, we know that Hopkins is talking about the beauty in variety—the beauty of “pied” things. 
 
The first part of the poem gives a rapid series of examples starting with “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” It is a comparison we would never find in any other 19th century English poet: the sky compared to a cow!  It’s a simile worthy of John Donne, and yet, odd as the juxtaposition is, I think it gives us a mental picture of the beauty of a blue sky dappled with white clouds. And maybe it makes us look at cows differently, too.
 
In the first part of the poem, Hopkins gives glory to God for the color and pattern of trout, for the fiery color of chestnuts on the ground, for birds’ wings. He also gives glory to God for human things: for the “plotted and pieced” landscape with “fold, fallow, and plough,” the fields, each in a different stage of use—the domestic beauty of an English farm. And “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim” have beauty of their own. We human beings, with our homeliest creations—our tools for work—are part of this beauty.
 
The common thread through these images is, of course, the variegated color and pattern in each example—they are all “pied.” But they are also linked by their ordinariness. Hopkins wrote other poems about shipwrecks, starry nights, windhovers and kingfishers. Here, he talks about ordinary things and common creatures.
 
In the second part of the poem, Hopkins continues to praise God not just for these “pied” beauties, but for “All things counter, original, spare, strange… fickle, freckled.” He praises God for the coming together of opposites—swift and slow, sweet and sour, dazzling and dim. The poem ends by giving credit where it is due. All these things, “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change.” God, unchanging in beauty, is the source, the father, of all this various, mutable, surprising beauty.
 
And there is one more example of “Pied Beauty” here: Hopkins’ poem is itself is an example of the kind of beauty he is talking about. The poem refuses to fall into the most common English verse form—iambic pentameter, with its ten regular syllables in each line. Instead, Hopkins writes in what he calls “sprung rhythm,” in which there is the same number of stresses in each line, but varying numbers of syllables. He wrote to a friend, “I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm…. To speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be but one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong.… It appears, I own, to be a better and more natural principle than the ordinary system, much more flexible, and capable of much greater effects.”
 
The beauty of Hopkins’ poetry was hard for his contemporaries—and even his closest friends!--to grasp. When he tried to publish his masterpiece “The Wreck of the Deutschland” in a Jesuit magazine, it was accepted—until the editor had second thoughts and turned it down. The use of sprung rhythm, and, in Hopkins’ words, “a great many more oddnesses, could not but dismay an editor’s eye.”
 
May we have eyes to see God’s creative hand not only in what is perfect, harmonious, and eternal—but in what is “original, spare, strange,” “fickle, freckled,” and transitory.

Corinna Laughlin