Pied Beauty

Examine how Donne and Hopkins deal with love and death
WIKIPEDIA

The Good-Morrow" is written from the point of view of an awaking lover and describes the lover's thoughts as he wakes next to his partner. The lover's musings move from discussing sensual love to spiritual love as he realises that, with spiritual love, the couple are liberated from fear and the need to seek adventure. The poem makes use of biblical and Catholic writings, indirectly referencing the legend of the Seven Sleepers and Paul the Apostle's description of divine, agapic love - two concepts with which, as a practising Catholic, Donne would have been familiar.
Donne's cartographic references in the third stanza have been the subject of much analysis, although academics have differed in their interpretation of their meaning and what the lines reference. Robert L. Sharp argues that these references can be logically interpreted as yet another reference to love; the maps Donne with which would have been familiar were not theMercator-style maps that are common in the modern era, but instead cordiform maps, which appear in the shape of a heart and allow for the display of multiple worlds, which Donne alludes to in lines 11 to 18. Julia M. Walker, while noting that Sharp's work is "essential to an intelligent discussion of this extended image",[1] disagrees with his conclusions and argues that Donne is actually referring to a map showing one world.

http://www3.dbu.edu/naugle/pdf/donne_philosophy_love.pdf
As a selfappointed investigator, he examined love from every conceivable angle, tested its hypotheses, experienced its joys, and embraced its sorrows. As Joan Bennett said,
Donne’s poetry is “the work of one who has tasted every fruit in love’s orchard. . .”
(134).
Combining his love for love and his love for ideas, Donne became love’s philosopher/poet or poet/philosopher. In the context of his poetry, both profane and sacred, Donne presents his experience and experiments, his machinations and imaginations, about love.1 Some believe that Donne was indeed “an accomplished
1 Louis Martz notes that “Donne’s love-poems take for their basic theme the problem of the place of love in a physical world dominated by change and death. The problem is broached in dozens of different ways, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by asserting the immortality of love, sometimes by declaring the futility of love” (169). In any case, the overwhelming question for Donne, according to
Martz, was “what is the nature of love, what is the ultimate ground of love’s being?”
(172). N. J. C. Andreasen has devoted a whole book to the subject of Donne’s philosophy of love in which he deals with what he called “the central problem in Donne’s love poetry: the nature of love dramatized in each poem and the attitude expressed by the poem toward that kind of love and toward the nature and purpose of love in general”
(13).2
philosopher of erotic ecstasy” (Perry 2), but such a judgment seems to be too much. T.
S. Eliot’s observations about Donne in this regard are more exact.

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/hopkins/section1.rhtml

The second quatrain within the octave describes the state of contemporary human life—the blind repetitiveness of human labor, and the sordidness and stain of “toil” and “trade.” The landscape in its natural state reflects God as its creator; but industry and the prioritization of the economic over the spiritual have transformed the landscape, and robbed humans of their sensitivity to the those few beauties of nature still left. The shoes people wear sever the physical connection between our feet and the earth they walk on, symbolizing an ever-increasing spiritual alienation from nature.
The sestet (the final six lines of the sonnet, enacting a turn or shift in argument) asserts that, in spite of the fallenness of Hopkins’s contemporary Victorian world, nature does not cease offering up its spiritual indices. Permeating the world is a deep “freshness” that testifies to the continual renewing power of God’s creation. This power of renewal is seen in the way morning always waits on the other side of dark night. The source of this constant regeneration is the grace of a God who “broods” over a seemingly lifeless world with the patient nurture of a mother hen. This final image is one of God guarding the potential of the world and containing within Himself the power and promise of rebirth. With the final exclamation (“ah! bright wings”) Hopkins suggests both an awed intuition of the beauty of God’s grace, and the joyful suddenness of a hatchling bird emerging out of God’s loving incubation.

http://englishlanguageliterature.com/2012/02/13/gerard-manley-hopkins-pied-beauty-notes/
The most powerful thing of all, however, is that all these changing things are created by God, for Hopkins the one unchanging being, and all he can do in the final line of the poem is to express his amazement in a short, utterly simple and almost breathless short line.

Throughout his life Hopkins was deeply fond of the countryside and its beauty, in which he could see the work and power of God. In ‘Pied Beauty’ he expresses his delight and astonishment at the sheer diversity of nature.

http://www.shmoop.com/pied-beauty/transience-theme.html
The poem argues that worldly beauty is created through the cycles of life and death.

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/hopkins/themes.html he also believed in nature’s power of regeneration, which comes from God. In “God’s Grandeur,” the speaker notes the wellspring that runs through nature and through humans. While Hopkins never doubted the presence of God in nature, he became increasingly depressed by late nineteenth-century life and began to doubt nature’s ability to withstand human destruction. His later poems, the so-called terrible sonnets, focus on images of death, including the harvest and vultures picking at prey. Rather than depict the glory of nature’s rebirth, these poems depict the deaths that must occur in order for the cycle of nature to continue. “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord” (1889) uses parched roots as a metaphor for despair: the speaker begs Christ to help him because Christ’s love will rejuvenate him, just as water helps rejuvenate dying foliage.
In “God’s Grandeur,” the speaker notes the wellspring that runs through nature and through humans