"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and a Jesuit priest who converted to Roman Catholicism. He was born in July of 1844 and died in June of 1889. He was regarded as one of the leading Victorian Poets.

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.

 

The diction in this poem, as written by the author, serves a two-fold purpose:

           The first is to give us a sense of the beauty of nature and that all God has created. Each interpretation is different from the next. He imparts a sense of diversity in nature, where each experience is different from the next. By saying "skies of couple-color as a brinded cow," he is admiring the many different forms that our world can take. Each encounter is "original, spare, [or] strange," yielding excitement in the hopes for new discoveries a possibilities and joy in the fact that God has taken his time to craft such beauty instead of just duplicating everything. The Earth is a place of endless possibilities, where carbon copies are non-existent, where beauty comes in more than just one variety.

          Secondly, the words he uses are all geared towards instilling a sense of these "dappled things.' The multitude of adjectives and descriptions he uses are numerous, creating new and unique perspectives to observe God's work with. Using descriptions, such as, "fickle, stipple, and freckled" to express these different takes. For one viewpoint, he appreciates the different flecks and dots upon trout, whereas another prospect admires the land as "fold, fallow, and plow." This exemplifies my first point: if everything created by God were the same, there would only be a set amount of ways to describe and ponder them. But by creating an assortment of different possibilities, the world's beauty not only lies within how it appears, but also, how diverse it can become.