Preview

Pied Beauty

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
3117 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Pied Beauty
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 swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
Práise hím.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918

The Poetry Foundation http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gerard-manley-hopkins "Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I."

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins Biography
Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially sprung rhythm) and his use of imagery established him as a daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse.

About The Poem

"Pied Beauty" is a curtal sonnet by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). It was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Background

In the poem, the narrator praises God for the variety of "dappled things" in nature, such as cattle, trout and finches. He also describes how falling chestnuts resemble coals bursting in a fire, because of the way in which the chestnuts'

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    4 O'Clock Birds Singing

    • 316 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In the poem, the author describes the scene of birds singing early in the morning and how quickly the sereneness ends. The author uses diction and metaphors to describe the birds’ song.…

    • 316 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Although he was also a painter, he was mostly known for being a “painter with words.” Born into one of Boston’s most influential families, Edward Estlin Cummings’ (later known as e.e. Cummings) iconoclastic poetry acquired much attention from 20th century society. Encompassing over a total of 2,900 poems, four plays, essays, and two autobiographical novels, Cummings’ work is plentiful. (Poets.org) However, his errant but meaningful misuse of punctuation and grammar, a unique form of literary cubism, is what sets him apart from the poets before him. Readers of all ages were drawn to his poems, as they presented a challenge both visually and psychologically. Cummings’ poems revolved around the topics of war, sex, and love, which further catapulted his popularity. (Kennedy) The idiosyncratic state of e.e. Cummings’ poems destined him to become one of the 20th century's most eminent literary voices.…

    • 2517 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    E. E. Cummings 's experimentation with form and language places him among the most innovative of twentieth-century poets. He developed a style so unique that his poetry was not fully appreciated until after his death. Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new and unique style of poetic expression. Like Charles Williams and many other poets of his time, Cummings expresses in his poetry his philosophical views of individualism and transcendentalism, and his criticism towards society 's intolerance of nonconformists. He particularly conveys his philosophy of individualism and view of how we are all forced to conform in his poem’s ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’ and his philosophy on transcendentalism in ‘maggie and milly and molly and may’ through the use of his experimental poetic techniques and his use of homophones, metaphor and personification.…

    • 784 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    He awes us with his picturesque imagery of a ‘small cloud of cabbage-whites circles[ing] a bush’ and builds an atmosphere of serenity with the words ‘ the first [snow]flakes of the season spun over Brookline’ and one can only wonder how similarly reassuring these images are. With the words ‘they [the people of Beacon Street] had forgotten the miracle’, we feel angered, depressed and guilt-ridden thinking about man’s eternal pre-occupation therefore not having enough time for the miracles and wonders of the world and the same is justified when he says ‘their [butterflies’ and snowflakes’] element of joy was quickly forgotten’ and we can’t help but feel pity for those little creations of nature which beg for attention but get none. While this cocktail of pity and sorrow steadily develops from one side, his words ‘the leaves dimmed… that the flakes spun like ashes’ makes us first fearful of the darkness that is to come, afraid that we might have to go without warmth and light and then make us realize that we have bigger things to worry about like death and senescence (ashes, white hair and Arctic virginity of death). We do however, admire him for loving his land as much as he does (but before… in the sun) and he goes on to cheer us up with the prospect of having snowflakes on your eyelids and hair and looking out at gleaming sea scales in St. Lucia (white butterflies… in the sun) which fills us with warmth because this juxtaposition reminds us that even though we might be on this earth for a short time, good use of our time can be made.…

    • 320 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    124

    • 859 Words
    • 1 Page

    known as father of free verse poetry. One of the most prolific, original, and versatile writers of…

    • 859 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Conflicting Perspectives

    • 576 Words
    • 3 Pages

    To what extent does this statement relate to your study of at least one of Hughes’ poems and one related text of your own choosing?…

    • 576 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    John Clare Essay

    • 760 Words
    • 4 Pages

    John Clare (1793-1864) was born on July 13 at Helpstone, a village in Northamptonshire, close to the Lincolnshire fens. His father, Parker Clare, worked as a farm laborer. In his spare time his father was also a rustic wrestler and ballad singer. Clare attended a dame school in his native village, and then went to Glinton School in the next village. When his father became ill with rheumatism, Clare began work first as a horse-boy, then ploughboy, then as a gardener at Burghley House. In 1812 he enlisted in the militia, returning home eighteen months later. He met Martha Turner in Casterton, who joined the Clare family just before the birth of the first of their eight children. Clare’s first book of poems appeared in 1820, published by Hessey and Taylor. The volume ran to four editions in the first year, and he became celebrated in London literary society as the “peasant poet”.…

    • 760 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Hopkins is an obvious God fearing poem; this poem is concerned with the continuous appreciation of everything god has created. In this poem Hopkins describes what he considers to be a few of the many miracles of god—"Glory…

    • 709 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The author of this poem is named Edgar Allan Poe, he lived from the year 1809 to 1849. The period of this time was the Victorian period, where literature and drama played an important role in many lives. Poe’s stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant…

    • 576 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The poem itself in free verse is modernist, defying conventional structured form and the language is more prose than scanned lines - the whole poem is a kick at traditional attitudes and the Victorians were not traditionalists but reactionaries regarding their attitudes to sex, so this is a complex revolutionary poem and extemely modern for its time.…

    • 459 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Beowulf Comparison Essay

    • 865 Words
    • 4 Pages

    . Romantic poetics. Blake: "Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds". William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria (Chap. 13). .…

    • 865 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Viking Marriage

    • 4988 Words
    • 20 Pages

    Happy am I to have won the joy of such a consort; I shall not go down basely in loneliness to the gods of…

    • 4988 Words
    • 20 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    She Walks in Beauty

    • 749 Words
    • 3 Pages

    almost aura like description of her inner beauty. In the first stanza he describes her beauty “She…

    • 749 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Robert Browning was a popular English poet, whom gained prominence during the Victorian era for his dramatic monologues. Readers are continuously drawn in by the manipulation, murder, mystery and inner thoughts of a psychopath, all of which are evident in his more disturbing poems, ‘My last duchess’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. Browning reveals the blurred lines between control, love and mental instability by using subtle techniques such as his choice in the form of poem and satire.…

    • 807 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The author used plenty of poetic devices in the passage such as alliteration, tone and repetition to emphasize God’s creation. For example, alliteration in “green grass” and “pine-tree pointed” was possibly used to anthropomorphize nature. This means to give human characteristics to non-human objects. Pine-trees were said to have fingers, oaks to have arms, lakes cuddle and rivers to run. The author also used repetition consistently in the poem to express that God created many things. He also switches to the word “then”, because it indicated that he started to create something else after he finished his past creation. James Weldon Johnson also used a little bit of a comical tone in the story for the purpose of creating a not-so-serious mood. He emphasized the tone by using playful words such as “cuddled” or even giving God human characteristics and body parts, saying that he smiled, that a rainbow curled itself around His shoulder, and that God raised his arm and waved his hand. The author using repetition and alliteration also developed the…

    • 251 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays