"Pied Beauty" is a curtal sonnet by the English poet

Gerard Manley Hopkins Gerard Manley Hopkins (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Society of Jesus, Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame places him among the leading English poets. His Prosody (linguistics), prosody – notably his concept of sprung ...

(1844–1889). It was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection ''Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins''.
The Classic Hundred Poems
'.

Background

In the poem, the narrator praises God for the variety of "dappled things" in nature, such as

piebald A piebald or pied animal is one that has a pattern of unpigmented spots (white) on a pigmented background of hair, feathers or scales. Thus a piebald black and white dog is a black dog with white spots. The animal's skin under the white backg ...

cattle,

trout Trout (: trout) is a generic common name for numerous species of carnivorous freshwater ray-finned fishes belonging to the genera '' Oncorhynchus'', ''Salmo'' and ''Salvelinus'', all of which are members of the subfamily Salmoninae in the ...

and

finch The true finches are small to medium-sized passerine birds in the family Fringillidae. Finches generally have stout conical bills adapted for eating seeds and nuts and often have colourful plumage. They occupy a great range of habitats where the ...

es. He also describes how falling

chestnut The chestnuts are the deciduous trees and shrubs in the genus ''Castanea'', in the beech family Fagaceae. The name also refers to the edible nuts they produce. They are native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Description ...

s resemble coals bursting in a fire, because of the way in which the chestnuts' reddish-brown meat is exposed when the shells break against the ground. The narrator then moves to an image of the landscape which has been "plotted and pieced" into fields (like quilt squares) by agriculture. At the end of the poem, the narrator emphasizes that God's beauty is "past change", and advises readers to "Praise him". This ending is gently ironic and beautifully surprising: the entire poem has been about variety, and then God's attribute of

immutability In object-oriented (OO) and functional programming, an immutable object (unchangeable object) is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created.Goetz et al. ''Java Concurrency in Practice''. Addison Wesley Professional, 2006, Secti ...

is praised in contrast. By juxtaposing God's changelessness with the vicissitudes of His creation, His separation from creation is emphasized, as is His vast creativity. This turn or volta also serves to highlight the poet's skill at uniting apparent opposites by means of form and content: the meter is Hopkins's own sprung rhythm, and the packing-in of various

alliterative Alliteration is the repetition of syllable-initial consonant sounds between nearby words, or of syllable-initial vowels if the syllables in question do not start with a consonant. It is often used as a List of narrative techniques#Style, litera ...

syllables serves as an aural example of the visual variety Hopkins describes.

References

External links

{{wikisource
"Pied Beauty" at the Poetry Foundation
* Haj Ross
"Beauty – How Hopkins Pied It"
Line-by-line, word-by-word exegesis. Poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins 1877 poems Victorian poetry