Pied Beauty

The poem Pied Beauty by G.M. Hopkins is a short simple poem which speaks on the natural beauty that surrounds us. The poem begins with the author praising God for ‘dappled things’.  Please note, the word dappled is a fancy way of saying spotted. The poem begins with the athor praising God for ‘dappled’ things and continues with him diverging into examples of the dappled beauties that exist naturally around us, for example, a brinded cow (moo) , a bird’s wings etc.

The primary theme of the poem is beauty through imperfection. G. M. Hopkins attempts to redefine beauty throughout the course of the piece. He speaks on how we can find beauty in everything around us and proceeds to provide us with sundry examples of such instances in nature.

The religious undertones of the piece are extremely prominent and cannot be ignored. The poem has frequently been termed a “hymn to creation”. The fact that the first phrase and the last phrase of the poem are both praises to God, can be seen as representative of how God is the beginning and the end:  the alpha and the omega. The parenthesized question on line 8 (who knows how?)  is a rhetorical question making the point that nobody knows how or why the world around us is so naturally diverse and beautiful. Through this the writer further evokes religious themes. The writer concludes by presenting what he believes should be our attitude in a brief, final line: "Praise Him."

Finally, there is a great deal of alliteration in the poem. Alliteration is basically a literary device where two words placed in succession will begin with the same letter. Pretty pigeons patter. There, that was alliteration. Anyway, as one can see by a surface reading of the poem, this technique is used a lot! The extended usage of different words beginning with the same letter can be seen as reflective of the idea of unity-in-diversity: the imperfect perfection the poem deals with.