Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—

brinded cow

Brindled—striped or streaked. Hopkins compares sunset clouds to the mottled hide of a cow, treating farmyard animals as models of divine beauty.

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;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls

Chestnuts split from their shells look like hot coals—brown shell, white inner flesh. Hopkins invented this compound word to catch the exact visual moment.

plotted and pieced

English farmland seen from above: a patchwork of different-colored fields. Fold (pasture), fallow (resting), plough (tilled)—three types of agricultural land.

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:

past change

The paradox: God creates all this variety and impermanence, but God himself is unchanging. Eternal stability generates temporary beauty.

Praise him.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Curtal Sonnet

Hopkins invented a new form for this poem—the curtal sonnet (from "curtailed," meaning shortened). A regular sonnet has 14 lines; this has 10½. He kept the proportions: a normal sonnet divides 8/6, this divides roughly 6/4½. The final "Praise him" is the tail, exactly three-quarters the length of a normal closing couplet.

The form matches the content. Hopkins is cataloging imperfect, odd, incomplete things—so he writes in an imperfect, odd, incomplete sonnet form. Even the structure is "pied" (multicolored, irregular).

Notice the sprung rhythm—Hopkins's term for his metrical system. He counts stresses, not syllables. "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls" has four heavy stresses crammed together with almost no unstressed syllables between them. This creates a dense, packed sound that mimics the visual density he's describing. Traditional iambic meter would smooth this out; Hopkins wants the bumpy texture.

What "Pied" Means

Pied means two or more colors in patches—like a pied piper's costume or a magpie ("pied" is in the bird's name). Hopkins lists things that are spotted, dappled, streaked, freckled, mottled. Every example is visually irregular: clouds that aren't one color, trout with spots, fields in a patchwork, finches with patterned wings.

Then he shifts to abstract opposites: counter, original, spare, strange / fickle, freckled / swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim. The poem itself becomes pied—mixing concrete nouns (trout, chestnuts) with abstract adjectives (strange, fickle).

Hopkins was a Jesuit priest writing in the 1870s. Catholic theology taught that God's creation reflects God's glory—but Hopkins focuses on what other Victorian poets ignored. Not the sublime mountain or the perfect rose, but the brindled cow, the freckled thing, the odd trade tool. This is theological: if God is perfect and unchanging, then even imperfection and change must somehow reveal divine beauty. The patchwork is the point.