Critical Appreciation For Pied Beauty

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

This beautiful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins runs on a single theme- Nature and its creator, God. He writes about the diversity and beauty of nature and how it changes everyday. Hopkins sees the power and creation of God through nature. This poem describes his wonder and awes at the creation of such an extraordinary and ever changing course that is nature.

�Glory be to God for dappled things,

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow,’

He uses words like �as a brinded cow’ to describe the sky, probably during sunset. When there is a blend of pale, dark, bright and pastel colours that spread across the clouds.

Hopkins has a characteristic method in his poems. He uses double- barreled words, such as �rose-moles’, �couple-colour’, etc. These words seem to splendidly sum up what Hopkins is trying to say. For example, �fresh- firecoal chestnut falls: finches’ wings’ refers to autumn and �for rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,’ refer to the mole like spots on a trout. He uses words that would not be normally used in conversations (well maybe except for mine). Hopkins manages to bring our senses to life, making us imagine beautiful things. He doesn’t need extra words to describe something- his words are simple and creates a realistic picture of what we think is beautiful. This creates a tone to the poem. When I read the poem I could see that Hopkins was awed and astounded by nature and was above all grateful for this glorious gift from God. He praises God in a very subtle manner, right until the end.

The end of the poem, the last stanza is an interesting one being only two words, but those two words sums up the focus of the poem. The verses of the poem are in a way subtle yet strong in a sense. The stanzas are arranged in an iambic style, meaning the end of the last word in the stanza ends with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The pattern of the rhythm is consistent till the sixth stanza, where the rhythm was �a’, �b’, �c’, �a’, �b’, �c’.