A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Hopkins
Excerpt:
The poem below is one of Hopkins’s variations on the Petrarchan sonnet, which he calls a “curtal” or restricted sonnet, made up of only ten and a half lines. With an “octave” of six lines of specific examples and a “sestet” of four and a half lines of descriptive adjectives, the sonnet explains Hopkins’s definition of beauty.
According to the Hopkins scholar Peter Milward, this is “essentially ‘pied beauty’ — beauty that is intricately interwoven with white and black, light and darkness, summer and winter, day and night, heaven and earth. Upon this fundamental contrast supervene the varied colors of the rainbow, even as the rising of the sun over the earth imparts to all things a dappled or mottled appearance and diversifies them in almost unlimited individuality.”
PIED BEAUTY
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-color 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 swíft, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
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