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Post by bluebird on Jan 14, 2019 19:01:20 GMT -5
I would not have appreciated this poem half so much as I do after reading Gerry's talk about it. It is filled with such
subtle poetic techniques that I am happy to be made aware of them by the analysis. Also, knowing about this poet's
personal life is helpful...for some reason I think of Dylan Thomas...in both cases, poems can't be separated from the man and
the life he is devoted to ... in Hopkins case a life that reflects the glory of God. In Dylan's I suppose a life that praises
a kind of "being always drunk" raging against the dying of the light and in both a joy in just using language in delightful ways.
But, anyway, I didn't at first pay attention to the stresses, the rhymes, the alliteration...all this was over my head
as I just paid attention to the praise of God in the poem. I also did not pay any attention to the iambic pentameter
or the sonnet form. Thanks Gerry for pointing these out...I don't know why I didn't give this poem the same kind
of attention I gave to Doty 's poem...maybe because it felt so old fashioned...shame on me.
Finally, I feel now that I should try out the sonnet form as Gerry describes it: the argument with stanza one
providing a premise and stanza two turning away from it....I'd like to hear more about the sonnet form and
try my hand at it.
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Post by Gerry on Jan 14, 2019 19:54:44 GMT -5
Just a quick note, Karen, that this isn't a sonnet, which is 14 lines long. Hopkins is, however, playing off that form.
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Jimmy
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Post by Jimmy on Jan 15, 2019 23:48:54 GMT -5
This poem has several structural elements working for it. First, it is a list poem, one where Hopkins catalogues a host of descriptions about the world he observes. As the poem seems to build away from disunity, I can’t help but wonder if he self-discovered the unity of his images as he was listing them. The poem for me enacts that discovery as we move from the disparate “dappled” through the collective “all trades” and finally reach the opposite coupled words in the third line of the second stanza. The opposites are presented each as balanced parts their own phrases, a unity of sorts. The end rhymes support the unity of all the poem’s images as do the hyphenated words and alliteration throughout.
At first glance, Pied Beauty seems to stand in opposition to Doty’s piece about the “splendor” of sameness. Individuality seems celebrated here. However, it is not the individuality of one over another but more “God given” individuality, innate and inescapable. The poem’s sounds accentuate the inherent interestingness of these differences among things/beings. As a reader, I begin to feel like saying “glory be because I am one of them, valuable without needing to be different than what I am and cannot escape.”
I really had to consider his use of the word change in the next to last line. I came to understand that “past change” means “not fickle, can be relied upon.” God becomes a unifier of the pied world and takes away the strife associated with its differences. Swift, slow, sweet or sour, all are united as part of creation.
A big contrast for me was Hopkins’ tone which is commanding where Doty’s is suggestive. I think he gets away with this in part because his sounds are so grand.
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Susan
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Post by Susan on Jan 16, 2019 18:37:24 GMT -5
How do these poems go together?
1. Thematically: Glory, splendor, heaven’s template, and of course fish (trout, though they are one image in this poem, not the central image)
2. Sound: What thrilling sounds in my ears and in my mouth reading this aloud!! Who have ever written a phrase like “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls”? or “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change” I’m swooning.
3. He’s so taken by the world, and begins with God instead of landing there, as Doty does. Doty’s observation of the mackerel leads him to splendor, while Hopkins begins with splendor and finds examples in nature that illustrate what he means.
4. Again, those liquid consonants: Landscape plotted … fold, fallow, plough
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Susan
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Post by Susan on Jan 16, 2019 18:40:25 GMT -5
Gerry, I just read your analysis. Thank you for all the detail about Hopkins the person and the form he played with. Like Karen, I might have just read this and said "hm... nice old poem" and gone on to something else had I not read it with Doty and now with your description. Thank you.
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linm
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Post by linm on Jan 16, 2019 20:35:00 GMT -5
I am so struck by how "Pied Beauty" consists almost entirely of nouns and adjectives. In the first stanza, there's only "Glory be" for a verb. I think this accounts for the extreme compression that Hopkins achieves. But it also emphasizes creation as accomplished; it's not a portrait of the world becoming-- as he says later, it's a world "whose beauty is past change" In the second stanza, the line "Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)” introduces two verbs. We become more aware of the poet as speaking the poem. The next verb, "fathers-forth," is a unique invention of Hopkins, asserting the on-going-ness of creation that produces the "constant beauty." The final verb, an imperative, stands alone, ending the poem, cutting it off, and interrupting the sonnet-line pattern. As you point out, Gerry, the second stanza as a whole turns away from the compendium of physical variety. The items in line 7 are off-the-beat of "beauty": "things counter, original, spare, strange." Even oddities, even what is "counter," that is, opposed, even that which is “original," or unconventional, non conforming, "spare" and "strange," are part of the scheme of a world that includes the blotched and the imperfect. To me this suggests Hopkins in including the non-conformists, non-believers, the outsiders, the originals, in the creation. "Whatever is fickle," also could refer to doubters. The following line introduces non-visual variety: swift and slow; sweet and sour; then two visual qualities, "adazzle" and "dim." These are all words that could also refer to human qualities--moods, personalities, natures. I think this is an ironic inclusion of those who resist Hopkins' theology. Everything in the flawed world, even disbelief, is divine.
Susan, I really like your point about Hopkins beginning with God and Doty working his way there. Doty goes is a different direction from Hopkins, in taking on the issue of personal consciousness and its survival, or not. His insight, for me, is really challenging -- so clearly elaborated, so hard to hold in mind. In common with Hopkins, his tone is one of wonder and awe, when most of us such a a thought of personal annihilation leads to despair.
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Post by betsey on Jan 17, 2019 10:18:47 GMT -5
Good analyses above. “Give me your ear and read me” says Hopkins, and we must. Such music in both poems. The luminous. The “who know how?” Interjection , for me, is so human within the sacred. And his dance of opposites! Makes us want to father or mother forth.
Also thinking about the “beauty past change’” line. Keat’s Grecian Urn. God: impossible to pin down?
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Post by Gerry on Jan 17, 2019 12:52:49 GMT -5
Betsey, I believe you're right, which is why, I think, too, that Hopkins explodes pentameter even in his sonnets: God cannot be contained or pinned down.
Lin, Hopkins begins with God because he saw poetry as a gift, as a way of celebrating God. It's funny, in general he was not a commanding speaker, according to his biographies. He was a mediocre teacher and even worse parish priest. But he can take the pulpit in the poems like nobody's business. Doty, on the other hand, is a postmodern American poet--few of them begin with God.
Jimmy and Susan, good readings, both, about the way these poems connect.
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Post by lildawnrae on Jan 19, 2019 16:10:30 GMT -5
I hesitated to say very much about Hopkins and Pied Beauty. I used to know this poem by heart, and it's difficult for me to be analytical with a poem I love so much. having said that, I love the way Pied Beauty is both formal and casual. Indeed, if it were an outfit, it would be positively baggy! I love the down to earth images: fish, cow, a patchwork of fields. Only the finch is traditionally beautiful. Is this the connection: both of these rather theological poems feature fish.
Thank you for two stimulating choices, Gerry!
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Jimmy
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Post by Jimmy on Jan 19, 2019 20:41:53 GMT -5
A teacher introduced me to this poem 20 years ago and even then it was roughly 100 years old. I’m amazed at how it holds up over time. As we’ve all noted, so much is special about this poem. Today I’m loving the “who knows how” interjection. Such humility and display of wonder. I know I’m often asking that same question in the face of this breathtaking world.
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Post by Gerry on Jan 21, 2019 15:02:05 GMT -5
Dawn, good point about the ix of casualness and seriousness. It's a poem that enacts its exuberance and restraint simultaneously.
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