Poem of the Week 2024/10

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 trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;

    Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)

        With swift, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:

                                                Práise hím.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

When I first came across poems by Hopkins, I couldn't figure out what he was doing: what were these odd accent marks in seemingly random places, these strange compound-words, the varying lengths of the lines? What turned the key in the lock for me was reading that he was fascinated & greatly influenced by Old English poetry (an increasing interest in a specific place's ancient culture is one of the more creative aspects of the growing nationalism of Hopkins's time, the late nineteenth-century, though its shadow side was a destructive tribalism & insistence on "cultural purity" meant to exclude outsiders). Suddenly the compound words made sense, as did his insistence on the beat falling in certain apparently irregular places: all attempts to recreate in late Victorian England the freshness & vigor of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Hopkins called his accentuation system sprung rhythm; the first beat of a foot is accented but may be followed by a varying number of unaccented syllables (Hopkins held that this method was closer to spoken speech, as well as to ancient ballads & nursery rhymes). When there might be doubt about whether to emphasize a syllable, he added an acute accent (as in the line With swift, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím); the grave accents (frecklèd) tell you that a syllable is to be pronounced but not emphasized.

The substance of this poem is straightforward: it is a hymn of praise to God the Creator (Hopkins was a convert to the Roman Catholic Church & became a Jesuit priest). The delight is in the details. Theologically, it is held that only God is perfect (his perfection is here significantly called his beauty, a beauty that is unchanging), so it follows that his creation is inherently imperfect, & that is what Hopkins celebrates here: not the whole, perfect, & pure, but the dappled, stippled, freckled. Not only are things imperfect, they metamorphose into other things: the multi-colored sky is a spotted cow! the fallen chestnuts are the glowing coals falling in the fireplace! The scope of the speaker's observations runs from the deep pink spots on the swimming trout (spots that disappear when the trout dies, so the spots are not only beautiful, but a sign of life) to vast landscapes, split up & varied.

Humanity appears here only by implication: in the landscapes pieced out & worked over, both the farmed & the (temporarily) fallow; in the "trades" – the way people work in & shape the world – with their particular & diverse equipment & tools. There is an implication that in the celestial eyes of the creator, the trout & the chestnut are equal to the farm & the worker. The poem begins with very specific examples, usually from the natural world, moves to include implied humanity in that nature, & then, perhaps a bit perversely, ends up including in the celebration even things that seem stubbornly, even perversely, opposed to the orderly:

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;

    Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)

You'd think a priest would be more prescriptive about the natural order of things, but the poet is suggesting that God's view is larger than ours: the answer to the parenthetical question who knows how? would be that God knows how, even if we do not (& the question could be read to suggest that we can't even know all the ways in which something may be freckled, as well as why & how it is so). In the line With swift, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím Hopkins is casting a very wide net; the contradictory pairs of words are an inclusive gathering of difference, all from the creative being of God, seen here in Catholic terms as God the Father (who fathers-forth this abundance). Our flawed states, even our brokenness & perversity, are part of the generosity of the creator. You don't have to accept Hopkins's view of God, or even believe in a god at all, to find in this celebration of the world's abundance a view of universal inclusive love.

I took this from the Oxford World's Classics edition of Selected Poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins.