The Pied Beauty of Hopkins’ Poetry: Fusing Freckled Fragments
At first glance, this mutant sonnet penned by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins appears to be a wonderful if slightly perplexing celebration of God and Nature. In the first half hour or so studying this elusive little poem I remained so fixated by the vibrancy and elegance of the imagery I overlooked what actually gives it that bewitching quality which seems so hard to place one’s finger on.
Yes, there is a gently rolling rhyming scheme that lulls us almost into a sort of stupor as little fragments of pastoral beauty are pushed into our minds, and there is that fascinating fixation on dappled imagery, on the beauty of imperfections, on the “skies of couple-colour”, the “finches’ wings”, but what is the significance of that one incredibly important word that almost escapes our attention?
“Strange.”
It boldly breaks the rhyming scheme but is still invited into the rhythm of the poem by the “change” in the penultimate line. At first I thought this strangeness was rooted in the sudden shift of the imagery from the grace and innocence of nature, the frozen fragments of impure purity, to the fluid movement and the enforced uniformity of humanity, their “plotted and pieced” farmland, “their gear and tackle and trim”.
But there is something far more interesting going on here, and it is not only strange but eminently beautiful.
After contemplating this poem for several hours as I went about my day, the first work of Hopkins that I had come across, I found my mind moving on from the rugged pastoral imagery, and instead returning again and again to several specific phrases… “Glory be to God”, “couple-colour”, “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls”, “plotted and pieced”, “fickle, freckled”, “swift, slow; sweet, sour”. There was something about them that was giving me a rather infuriating sense of familiarity, but I had most definitely never read the poem before.
Glory be to God. Couple-colour… cow. Fresh-firecoal. Firecoal falls. Plotted, pieced, plough. Trades, trim. Fathers-forth. Swift, slow, sweet, sour… Strange. Strange. Strange.
And then, like a falling firecoal, it hit me. This language was familiar, but not because I had come across Pied Beauty before, or because I have an intimate knowledge of Victorian poetry, which I don’t. It was because these wonderfully peculiar fusions of certain words, sounds and images reminded me in a moment of epiphany-like realisation of another poem, one written almost a thousand years before.
I rushed to a computer and hurriedly looked up Hopkins to discover that he was indeed noted for his unique divergence from the uniform rhythm of Victorian poetry, and then I saw a single word on the screen that confirmed my tentative suspicions. Hopkins had been inspired by Beowulf. Beowulf.
I greedily poured over the eleven lines of Pied Beauty again, and suddenly, the connections were searingly obvious. Alliterative repetition, though not as formulaic as in Beowulf, is everywhere. And that fantastic fusion of fragments, “couple-colour”, “fresh-firecoal”, immediately evokes the “scops” of Old English, from the Greek “scieppan”, “to build” or “to make”. These poets of old used to fuse half-lines and disparate words together to create thousands of variations of a single idea, as the mason of Beowulf does to striking effect, a sword for instance being, among a hundred other variants, a “battle-flame”. They literally built poetry from existing blocks, forging epic verse from the same raw material into an infinite number of shapes and sounds. And the fragmentation of Hopkins’ Pied Beauty, even of the prose in his diaries, is potently reminiscent of those fused fragments in Beowulf.
Strange beauty, indeed.
