"Pied Beauty" is a curtal sonnet

Curtal sonnet

The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and used in three of his poems.It is an eleven-line sonnet, but rather than the first eleven lines of a standard sonnet it consists of precisely ¾ of the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet shrunk proportionally...

 by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...

 (1844–1889). It was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In the poem, the narrator praises God for the variety of "dappled things" in nature, such as cattle, trout

Trout

Trout is the name for a number of species of freshwater and saltwater fish belonging to the Salmoninae subfamily of the family Salmonidae. Salmon belong to the same family as trout. Most salmon species spend almost all their lives in salt water...

 and finch

Finch

The true finches are passerine birds in the family Fringillidae. They are predominantly seed-eating songbirds. Most are native to the Northern Hemisphere, but one subfamily is endemic to the Neotropics, one to the Hawaiian Islands, and one subfamily – monotypic at genus level – is found...

es. He also describes how falling chestnut

Chestnut

Chestnut , some species called chinkapin or chinquapin, is a genus of eight or nine species of deciduous trees and shrubs in the beech family Fagaceae, native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The name also refers to the edible nuts they produce.-Species:The chestnut belongs to the...

s resemble coals bursting in a fire, because of the way in which the chestnuts' reddish-brown meat is exposed when the shells break against the ground. The narrator then moves to an image of the landscape which has been "plotted and pieced" into fields (like quilt squares) by agriculture. At the end of the poem, the narrator emphasizes that God's beauty is "past change", and advises readers to "Praise him". This ending is gently ironic and beautifully surprising: the entire poem has been about variety, and then God's attribute of immutability

Immutability (theology)

Immutability is the doctrine of classical Christian theism that God cannot change; this has been variously interpreted to mean either that God's nature cannot change but that God can, or that God himself cannot change at all...

 is praised in contrast. By juxtaposing God's changelessness with the vicissitude of His creation, His separation from creation is emphasized, as is His vast creativity. This turn or volta

Volta (literature)

In literature, the volta, also referred to as the turn, is the shift or point of dramatic change. The term is most frequently used in discussion of sonnet form, in which the volta marks a shift in thought...

 also serves to highlight the poet's skill at uniting apparent opposites by means of form and content: the meter is Hopkins's own sprung rhythm

Sprung rhythm

Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables...

, and the packing-in of various alliterative syllables serves as an aural example of the visual variety Hopkins describes.

Text of the poem

Glory be to God for dappled things—

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;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.



All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.