Pied Beauty

The poem “Pied Beauty” written by Gerald Manley Hopkins on the theme of praising the beauty and diversity of nature, it is almost like a hymn of creation, praising God by praising the created world. The literal meaning of “pied” is having two or more different colours. The title itself gives an impression or an idea about the poem. When we think of pied, an image is created in our minds of beautiful colours in our world.
This poem is a miniature or set-piece, and a kind of ritual observance. It begins and ends with variations on the mottoes of the Jesuit order (“to the greater glory of God” and “praise him”), which gives it a traditional flavor, tempering the unorthodoxy of its appreciations. In other words the poet appreciates and puts his thoughts about nature in the poem. The parallelism of the beginning and end correspond to a larger symmetry within the poem: the first part begins with God and then moves to praise his creations. In the next five lines Hopkins elaborates what things in nature he means to include in his rubric of “dappled”.Hopkins has used “couple-colour” which also relates to the different shades of colours of nature. The phrase “brinded cows”,in this respect, skies are like cows, which may be brown with streaks or patches of another colour. The colours of different shades of grey is compared to the different shades of colours of streaks or patches on the cows.
Now the poet turns the focus to rivers, Hopkins compares the spots on a speckled trout to mole, the rose colour of their skins. Hopkins has used the word rose rather than pink or red to describe the colour of the trout. The choice of words for every line is very precise for that particular line.The mention of the “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls” in the fourth line, however, introduces a moral tenor to the list. Though the description is still physical, the idea of a nugget of goodness imprisoned within a hard exterior invites a consideration of essential value in a way that the speckles on a cow.Now Hopkins has broadened his view over nature. Hopkins first introduces a landscape whose characteristics derive from man’s alteration (the fields) some ploughed,some barren,some green with crops, and then includes “trades,” “gear,” “tackle,” and “trim” as diverse items that are man-made. But he then goes on to include these things, along with the preceding list, as part of God’s work.
Hopkins does not refer explicitly to human beings themselves, or to the variations that exist among them, in his catalogue of the dappled and diverse. But the next section opens with a list of qualities (“counter, original, spare, strange”) which, though they doggedly refer to “things” rather than people, cannot but be considered in moral terms as well
With “fickle” and “freckled” in the eighth line, Hopkins introduces a moral and an aesthetic quality, each of which would conventionally convey a negative judgment, in order to fold even the base and the ugly back into his worshipful inventory of God’s gloriously “pied” creation.
The poem is thus a hymn of creation, praising God by praising the created world. It expresses the theological position that the great variety in the natural world is a testimony to the perfect unity of God and the infinitude of His creative power. In the context of a Victorian age that valued uniformity, efficiency, and standardization, this theological notion takes on a tone of protest.
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.
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.”