Pied Beauty. Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pied Beauty. Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins
Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins
Pied Beauty

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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) wrote Pied Beauty in 1877. This poem reflects his religious fervour. It is a lyric poem in which the author praises God, the Creator, and the opening phrase of the poem “Glory be to God” stems from the motto of Hopkins’ Jesuit society “Ad majorem Dei gloriam” which means “to the greater glory of God”. The theme of the poem is the nature in its variety as a gift of God for which we all should be thankful.
The poem is written in a form of curtal sonnet, a shortened or contracted sonnet which consists of eleven lines (or 10.5 lines respectively) instead of usual fourteen as in Shakespearean sonnets. Hopkins reduced the eight lines of the octave to six (here two tercets rhyming ABC ABC) and shortened the six lines of the sestet to four and half. The meter of Pied Beauty is sprung rhythm which is a term used by Hopkins to describe a metric format that permits an unlimited number of unstressed syllables in each line to accompany stressed syllables. A metric foot in sprung rhythm usually contains one to four syllables. The rhyme scheme of the poem is following. As written above, the lines of two tercets rhyme in ABCABC scheme, the lines 7 to 11 rhyme in DBCDC scheme.
The structure of Pied Beauty is as follows. The opening and the closing phrases are praising God for his gifts - “Glory be to God for dappled things” and “Praise him”. Between these call to...

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