Joanne: Hello, I'm Joanne Diaz, an English professor at Illinois Wesleyan University. Abram: And I'm Abram Van Engen, an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Joanne: And this is Poetry for All. Abram: This podcast is for those who already love poetry and for those who know very little about it. Joanne: In this podcast, we'll read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and then read it one more time. Abram: And today, we're reading what is probably the most famous poem written by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”. Joanne, before we read this poem, can you tell us just a little bit about who Hopkins was? Joanne: Yeah, he had such an interesting life. He was born in 1844. He was born into a family of artistic, intellectual individuals, a middle class sort of environment. He goes to Oxford for an education, and when he's there, he converts to Roman Catholicism. He was a Catholic and he ended up being rather alienated from his family members. And that was a source of real sadness for him throughout his adult life. He's a Jesuit priest and he had a pretty unremarkable life in the sense that he was very sort of isolated. He had frequent moments of despair in his life, but he was writing poems all the way through. He never published his work in his own lifetime. And so when he dies at the age of 44 of typhoid fever. It's a pretty unremarkable death, and a friend of his doesn't publish his work until 1918. So even though Hopkins is chronologically a poet whose writing in the Victorian era, his work isn't revealed to the world until after World War I. Because he's so innovative, because he's so experimental, a lot of modernists sort of hailed him as a hero. But really, for decades, no one knew who he was. And, you know, in recent years, scholars and critics have reassessed his life and his work. And they've seen, based on his correspondence, that he was a gay poet, which does figure into a rethinking of his work as a whole. Abram: Thank you. That's great. And, you know, I think it's worth noting he's a Jesuit priest. So a lot of his poetry is about Christian ideas, Christian themes, Christian theology. And yet he's picked up by non Christians throughout the 20th century and has inspired a lot of poets in a lot of ways, in part because he's so inventive. And so he's had this huge influence in the 20th century, which he certainly did not have in his own lifetime. Would you be willing to read for us “Pied Beauty”? Joanne: Yes. [To read “Pied Beauty,” go here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44399/pied-beauty] Abram: I love this poet. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins. I gotta admit, he's one of my favorite poets of all time. Joanne: I know he is. Abram: When I teach Hopkins to folks who don't tend to read poetry very much, one of the things I love to do with Hopkins, his poetry is often very difficult to get the meaning out of, to get the sense out of and yet, when you listen to the poetry, it sounds incredible. And that, for Hopkins, is incredibly important to his whole poetic endeavor. He constantly dwells in the music and the sound, in the beauty of the words themselves. He's working with that music. To bring out the meaning and so it's a perfect poet for thinking about how poems can draw us up short and cause us to pay attention before we even know what they mean or what they're even about. Joanne: I love what you're saying because it helps me understand both the simplicity and the complexity of the poem and how that directly relates to the content of what he's saying. So the complexity is, yes, the language. Even as I read the poem aloud, it took me time to articulate and shape each of those words as I said them. It slowed me down and made me think. Amazingly though, this is not a complex poem to understand, which is to say, it only has a couple of simple gestures. It begins in a posture of praise. “Glory be to God for dappled things”. Thank you, God, for making these things that are so varied, so dappled, so speckled, so strange. And then he creates a list of those things. And then the second stanza continues to basically say, Anything that is strange, counter, fickle, freckled, who knows how it becomes that way, but whatever it is, God is the one who made these things, and because he made them, they are beautiful in a way that is constant and eternal. Thank you, God. That's basically the shape of the poem, which is actually quite simple, no? Abram: Yes, absolutely. And one of the things he's doing with that, yes, it could be original, spare, strange. It seems not to fit when we look at it. Everything seems so diverse and so particular, and yet it is precisely that particularity and that diversity that is what makes it beautiful, and the beauty of it shows us the intention behind it. And so, the variety has this underlying unity, this beauty that is past change, this God that is fathering it forth. I mean, if you think about even just that first line, “glory be to God for dappled things”, it's not the way we usually end a phrase, glory be to God, glory be to God for love, or glory be to God for some big abstract thing, right? “Glory be to God for dappled things”. It's already incredibly particular and that word things draws us to what's going to follow, which is a bunch of things, like really particular things he's going to draw our attention to. Joanne: Okay, but even before that first line, you've got the title, “Pied Beauty”. And that word pied means variable, inconstant, flawed, dappled, speckled. You know, quite often you think of beauty as something perfect, as unified, as whole, as complete. But this is a poem that's signaling that it's going to emphasize what is perhaps variable or inconstant. And that's really exciting to me that that's his source of interest. Abram: Yeah. And of course it relates back to who he was. I mean, this isn't an original spare, strange sort of fellow who's writing this poem, right? I mean, a gay Jesuit priest in Victorian England, who's kind of reclusive and who never publishes his poetry. He is somewhat counter, you might say. Joanne: Yes, yes Abram: And yet, and so he's finding a way in this poem as well, which is really not about him, and yet it is, right? It's about how all of these things fit. And one of the ways I think about how he accomplishes that in this poem, I love his just sort of virtuosic alliteration in this poem. So alliteration is the repetition of that first sound of a word. And of course you get that with glory be to God, the G's, glory be to God. So that's how the poem begins. But then it just comes up again and again and again. Couple, color, cow. If you follow the Fs in particular, fresh, fire, cold, falls, finches, fold, follow, fickle, freckled, father's, forth, right? Or all the Ss. What is alliteration? Alliteration is a sameness at the beginning that produces difference in the word itself. And that's what the poem is. It's about all of these differences, all of this variety, flowing from an underlying beginning sameness. Joanne: Yes, but also, aren't you impressed with, yes, it's a tiny lyric poem, but it's so big. It's so all encompassing. It's so democratic in its vista, right? So, like, he looks at the sky, and he sees colors that remind him of a cow. He sees a trout and he sees a mole that's shaped like a rose and the rose moles are all in stipple as if an artist created them. He sees the landscape and he sees it in abundance and after it's been harvested. He sees it all. Every line is so packed. Abram: Yes and the underlying energy of it all. I love this image. “Fresh-firecoal, chestnut-falls”. What is that? Well, when chestnuts fall from the tree, they open on the outside. They're this spiky, greenish exterior. When they open, they look like flaming coals on the inside. And so in a certain sense, with that one image, he sees a forest full of these open chestnuts on the ground, and he sees this sort of burning embers inside of everything that reminds him basically of the eminence of God. That is that God is in all of this stuff. God is in the trout, in the sky, in the chestnuts, and so this is really central to his whole sort of theological perception. He really wants to draw out the way that God is sort of this burning ember at the center of it all. Joanne: Oh my god, that's amazing, so that not only must beauty be diverse and varied. It must also be attentive to every particular thing in the world, every human, everything, every element of nature. It's all energized with this essence that you're describing, right? Abram: Yes. Beauty is not abstract. It's particular. I mean, one way to think about the shape of this poem is that it begins and ends. In a certain sense with a thesis, but in the middle, it's a kind of opposite of an hourglass shape. We begin with a whole variety of particular examples, trout, chestnut, etc. And then in the second stanza, he begins to expand with all the possible adjectives that can describe all of this stuff. Counter, original, spare, strange, fickle, freckled, swift, slow, sweet, sour, a dazzle, dim. And of course they're all opposites, right? A dazzle and dim, sweet and sour. Right? And so he's trying to cover basically in three lines, the full gamut of the world. Basically, adjectives that can describe every potential thing in the world, and all of it is a sign of God at work, because it's Him, God, at the beginning, who fathers forth everything. All of it, whose beauty is itself past change. Joanne: You know, for an individual who did not have an easy life he had a lot of suffering and sorrow in his life. This is such a joyful poem. It's extraordinary. It is so celebratory. It's so praiseworthy. It's so exuberant. Abram: Yes. This is, in a certain sense, a Jesuit exercise. The first line is the beginning of a Jesuit exercise. Jesuits, at the beginning and end of all the papers that they would write about anything, they would put AMDG at the beginning, and that means ad majorum Dei gloriam, which is “to the greater glory of God”. And at the end of their exercises, they would put LDS, that is, Laus Deo Semper, which is “praise be to God always”. And so, he's doing that, right? This is a Jesuit exercise. The beginning is glory be to God, the end is praise be to God. And that's how every Jesuit exercise begins and ends. And yet what he's filling the content with is basically a question, well why glory be to God? And the answer to that is for all the dappled things. And what I find amazing about this poem is how it draws him up short. You can almost see him, in the end, out of speech itself, caught up short, because he can't even fill in the last line. There's only two words to that last line. Praise him. There's no words left to say. We've talked before about how poets draw out silence. One of the ways is you have a full line that's supposed to be filled with words, and all you have are two words. Praise him. There's nothing else to say. I love poems that end with those simple two words. I mean, it reminds me of Herbert's poem on prayer. That ends just with those two words. Something understood. That's it. There's nothing left to say. Joanne: Oh, what about the collar? The collar does the same thing. My lord, right? Oh my god. It's the same thing. Do you feel like one of the reasons it is so powerful? To have just after this enormous, exhaustive list of all of the brindled, dappled, speckled, freckled things in the world, praise him. It's a moment of almost supplication, surrender, just humility, isn't it? It really astonishes me. Abram: Yeah, absolutely, and it goes with that parenthetical, it's four lines up, “who knows how”, at some point, explanations cease, and what's left is praise. Joanne: That's great. With all of this in mind, would you be willing to read the poem again, please? Abram: Absolutely. [poem] Joanne: Thank you so much. What a beautiful poem. For more information on Gerard Manley Hopkins's Work, please see the Poetry for All website at poetryforall.fireside.fm. Abram: And please remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Joanne: Thank you for listening.