Pied Beauty Essay Questions

Using examples from the text, describe how Hopkins both draws on and complicates the tradition of devotional nature poetry and the conception of God’s design.

Hopkins’ poem draws substantially on both the Romantic tradition of nature poetry, and on the paens to God as Creator found in the Bible. “Pied Beauty” seems particularly indebted to Psalm 138, which features the recurrent refrain of “praise him” upon which the poem ends, and also shares with "Pied Beauty" a paratactic, list-like structure depicting the wonder and diversity of God’s creations. But in contrast to the Psalm, which leaves the scenery it describes largely generic and abstract, Hopkins’ language is highly specific and concrete; he praises not just any sky but “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;” not animal life in general but “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.” This, combined with the fact that the references to God in “Pied Beauty” bracket the poem rather than recur throughout, creates an emphasis on the poet’s own, individual act of perception. This relationship to God the Creator is more personal, more active—the full beauty of God’s design isn’t self-evident, but must be looked for, with care and attention.

How does Hopkins use poetic devices such as alliteration, assonance, and meter to contribute to the meaning of “Pied Beauty”?

The world as Hopkins depicts it in “Pied Beauty” is a complex harmony of pattern and specificity, order and variation—characteristics that also define his poetics. Alliteration is often described as a technique for emphasizing some particular word or idea, but it equally—as in the line “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings,” for example—trips up, or slows down, the reading process. Almost like a kind of tongue-twister, this line forces the reader, in pronouncing it, to attend carefully to the concrete, physical process of producing the correct sounds. This allows the words themselves to become a kind of sensory experience, and guides the reader towards the same sort of careful attention to detail exhibited by Hopkins’ descriptions throughout the poem.