Pied Beauty

One of the difficulties of Hopkins’s life was his inability to combine his love for God with his desire to create and share poetry. Despite Hopkins’s fear that his poetry detracted from his devotion to God, “Pied Beauty” relies on poetic language and imagistic focuses to explain God’s Constancy. The poem begins with “Glory be to God for dappled things” (Line 1) and ends with “Praise him” (Line 11). God is at the beginning and end of the poem, a reference to the biblical quote, from Revelation 22:13, in which God states: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Technically, Hopkins chooses this placement with purpose: To expand his devotion to God, he places the Creator at the start and end of the poem, along with directives reminding the reader to glorify Him, which develops the theme of Praising God: Creator and Creation.

Hopkins’s devotion to God and his poeticizing of the natural world were two of his lifetime pursuits. The poem’s first stanza focuses on an alliterative description of the natural world, beginning with, “For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim” (Lines 2-3).