this is a slide presentation of Pied Beauty

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2. THE POEM
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5. The heavens declare the glory of God.
The earth is the lord’s, and all its fullness, the
world and those who dwell therein.
Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for
his mercy endures forever.
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6. Praise the Lord;......
Praise him for his mighty acts;.....
Let everything that has breath
praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.
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7. ANALYSIS OF THE
POEM
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16. SWEET & SOUR
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18. Oh, Lord my God ,when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the works thy hands have made;
I see the stars I hear the mighty thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed
Then sings my Lord, my Saviour God to thee
How great Thou art, How great Thou art
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21. 1) Nature
 Hopkins has a poet’s sharp eye for the intricate details in nature
and this poem is rooted in the landscape he knows very well.
 Full of reference to British flora and fauna.
 He values all creatures and believes everyone of them is beautiful.
 Hopkins has a large & vast appreciation of nature.
 As a painter, Hopkins sees everything with an artistic eye.
 In this poem, Hopkins epitomises the beauty of different colours
which he finds in nature.
 Hopkins sees nature as pied.
 He includes all the aspects in a broadest concept; sky, land and
sea.
 The poet brings-out a sense of calmness and tranquillity of nature.
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22. 2) Praising God
 Hopkins is a priest. Therefore he always praises God for everything.
 His theory is that everything in this world should be praised, without
considering how they look like; everything has a beauty.
 He wants us to glorify God and all his creations.
 In the poem “Pied Beauty”, Hopkins glorifies God for “dappled things”.
 He glorifies God even for “fickle freckled”.
 Hopkins tells though the creations of God have undergone changes, God
is beyond change.
 God’s attribute of immutability is praised.
 Thematically, this poem is a simple hymn of praise for “dappled things”.
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23. 3) Diversity
 “Pied Beauty” is a hymn of praise to the variety of God’s creation which is
contrasted with the unity and non-changing nature of God.
 Diversity is embodied in the “dappled things” of nature- piebald clouds,
cattle, trout, finches and so on.
 Diversity in the sense the poet not only talks about big objects as sky,
but also talks about small objects as finches.
 Hopkins celebrates diversity in God’s creation.
 Hopkins adopts the Catholic view that God is the only unity in the world-
everything exists in diversity. 23

24. 4) Unity in diversity
 There is unity in diversity, in the poet’s juxtaposition of
contrasting elements.
 Thus, the solid familiar form of the cow is set against the
unbounded, infinite sky, just as the various finite and ever
changing forms of creation are set against oneness, infinity
and constancy of God.
 All the things in nature are united as the creations of God.
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25. 5) Beauty
 The poem is a celebration of beauty in all its forms.
 Whether fickle or freckled; fragile or changeable, all
God’s creations have beauty in their own unique
ways.
 According to the poem, everything and everybody is
beautiful in its own way.
 Hopkins sees beauty where others sees flaws.
 The appreciation of beauty in this Victorian poetry
is a reaction to the spread of ugliness under the
impact of relentless industrialisation. 25

26. 6) Transience
 According to the poem, the beauty of the earth is on change.
 Hopkins sees the same patterns of transient beauty in the
greatness of a clouded sky or the smallness of finches’ wings.
 Though man also has the power of creation, it is not permanent.
 According to the poet, God is the only being that doesn’t
change.
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27. 7) Man and Nature
 At a time, when industrial revolution was prompting many
writers to lament over the growing gap between man and
nature and the consequent destruction of the country side,
this poem is a celebration of the oneness between rural man
and land.
 Hopkins portrays man as another organic part of God’s
creation.
 The trades mentioned by the poet bring man into a co-
operative and creative relationship with nature as well as
Creator.
“their gear and tackled and trim” 27

28. 8) Moral and personal aspect
 The “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls” seems to open-up a
moral and personal aspect to the theme of variety.
 The idea of broken-open chestnuts revealing a shining
hidden glory within.
 It suggests that an unremarkable or flawed exterior can
conceal a beautiful divinely inspired soul.
 This suggestion is picked-up by the ambitious adjectives
“fickle, freckled”, which are commonly used to describe
things which were not approved by the Victorian
mainstream, like inconstant lovers and flawed
complexion. 28

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30. Curtal Sonnet
 “Pied Beauty” is a curtal or shortened sonnets.
 It differs from the standard Petrarchan sonnet.
 In the curtal sonnet, the octave becomes a sestet and the sestet becomes a
quatrain (four lines), followed by a half-line tail-piece.
 The progression is from the vast and infinite to the small and particular.
 The second stanza or quatrain reverses this process, ranging from the
particular and varied “All things,” to the more abstract qualities such as
swiftness and slowness, thence to God’s act of creation (“He fathers-forth,”)
and ultimately, to the unchanging nature of God himself.
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31. SPRUNG RHYTHM
 Hopkins based his sprung rhythm on the metrical systems of Anglo-Saxon
and traditional Welsh poetry.
 Sprung rhythm is based on the number of stressed syllables in a line and
permits any number of unstressed syllables.
 Each foot consists of a first strongly stressed syllable, which either stands
alone or is followed by unstressed syllables. Generally there are between one
and four.
Eg: “Glory | be to | God for | dappled | things,”
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32. DICTION
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33. ALLITERATION
Line 1:....Glory be to God
Line 2:....skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow
Line 4:....Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches
Line 5:....Landscape plotted and pieced
Line 6:....trádes, their gear and tackle and trim
Line 7:....spare, strange
Line 9:....swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim
Line10:...He fathers-forth whose
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34. 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 all trades, 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.
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35. Rhyme Scheme
 The rhyme scheme of “Pied Beauty” is
a-b-c-a-b-c for the sestet, and
d-b-c-d-c for the quatrain and tail-piece.
Eg :
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things - wings
cow – plough - how
swim – trim – dim – him
Strange - change

36. CONSONANCE
‘dappled’
‘stipple’
‘tackle’
‘fickle’
‘freckled’
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37.  Old testament biblical hymn/ Psalm writing
style.
Starts with “Glory be to God”
Ends with “Praise Him”
 Tone is exuberant & spirited.
 The speaker is Hopkins himself.
STYLE , TONE & SPEAKER
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39. Oxymoron
swift, slow;
sweet, sour;
adazzle, dim;
Anaphora
“For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;”
Other devices
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40.  Metaphor
 Line 3: “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim”
Comparison of the spots on a speckled trout to moles
 Line 4: “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls”
Comparison of chestnut kernels to burning coals
 Line 10: “suckled in a creed outworn”
Comparison of creed to a mother nursing her child
 Simile
 Lines 2: “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow”
Comparison of skies to a cow
METAPHOR, SIMILE & IMAGERY
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41.  Inscape is a concept that Hopkins derived from the medieval
philosopher Duns Scotus.
 Everything in the universe, according to Hopkins, is
characterized by a distinctive design that constitutes
individual identity.
 In other words, inscape is those characteristics that give
each thing in the world its uniqueness and, differentiating it
from other things.
INSCAPE
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42.  “Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) ”
RHETORICAL QUESTION
 “Praise him”
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43. “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:”
 This ending is gently ironic and beautifully surprising: the
entire poem has been about variety, and then God's attribute
of immutability is praised in contrast. By juxtaposing God's
changelessness with the vicissitude of His creation, His
separation from creation is emphasized, as is His vast
creativity.
IRONY
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44. A Sunday Afternoon in the Park
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45. AN OVERVIEW OF THE POEM
“PIED BEAUTY”
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46. Conclusion
“Every good gift and every perfect
gift is from above, and cometh down
from the Father of lights, with whom
is no variableness, neither shadow of
turning.”
James 1:17
Nature is the lovely manifestations of God
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47. Bibliography
 “God’s Grandeur,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips,
Oxford University Press, 1986.
 Letter to Robert Bridges, February 15, 1879, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited
by Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press, 1986.
 “Pied Beauty,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips, Oxford
University Press, 1986, pp. 132–33.
 “Jesuits Worldwide,” in Jesuits in Britain, the official website of the British Province of the
Society of Jesus,
 Lowell, Robert, “Hopkins’s Sanctity,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Symposium by the
Kenyon Critics, Burns & Oates, 1975, p. 92.
 Mariani, Paul L., A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Cornell
University Press, 1970.
 Milward, Peter, S.J., A Commentary on the Sonnets of G. M. Hopkins, Hokuseido Press, 1969.
 http://www.jesuit.org.uk/overseas/worldwide.htm (25-05- 2015).
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