Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkin’s “Pied Beauty” is a colorful sonnet containing the beautiful imagery of God’s creation. The sonnet starts out by paying tribute to God for forming such things for us to enjoy.

“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;”

He pays tribute for the sky “of coupled-colour” which I would think means white and blue. He pairs on the same line with the sky, the brinded cow, which is a cow with dark patches. This is similar to the sky with light patches of clouds. He mentions the colorful speckles of a trout. The “rose-moles all in stipple” I thought was a perfect way to describe the markings of a trout, very colorful and dotted all over. The “firecoal chesnut” also gives a great image of a bright orange chesnut falling through the air. When I read finches wings I had to look them up on google to see what he meant, and I must say, the golden finch has some of the prettiest wings I have seen on a bird, absolutely gorgeous. The image that was most clear for me though is the “Landscape plotted and pieced”, this was very easy to imagine because that is all I look at when I am in an airplane, I always choose the window seat and love to watch the terrain change from farm to farm. When you look down you see deep greens for a ripe harvest or a brown for freshly plowed it makes quite the quilt pattern.

Hopkin’s then goes on to praise all the things that are beautiful that he left out, “counter, original, spare, strange” he names them all. If you notice the word grouping in the previous selection, his word grouping is very nice in the sonnet, when read aloud you will notice that the sharp sounding words are in a line and then you have smooth sounds grouped together, its as pleasing to the ears as it is to the mind.

When I read this sonnet I can just envision a beautiful day in the country, no city for miles, just immersing myself in the colors of nature. This poem just makes you want to go outside and enjoy a bright summer day in the countryside.