• Skip to main content

Aesthetic Realism Online Library

Home > Poetry > The Critical Muse

Comment by Eli Siegel on Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”

The general way of Aesthetic Realism is present in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty.” With Hopkins, the religious way of seeing welcomed precision, detail, perceptive speed, the determination of courageous observing. Aesthetic Realism stands for the utter regard of any object whatsoever—in all its ontological nonconformity—and the deepest respect for existence, as such, as the cause of value, and the Hopkins poem “Pied Beauty” goes along with that purpose.

From The Critical Muse: Imperative Aesthetic Realism Illustrations
© 1974 by Aesthetic Realism Foundation

Pied Beauty

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.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W.H. Garner and N.H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp.69-70.

Eli Siegel on Beauty
Anthropology & Aesthetics
US Congressional Record
Book Store

Stay in touch

Receive email alerts for each new issue of The Right Of, and announcements of events at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

Subscribe

Follow us:   

Contact Us Support Our Work

Aesthetic Realism Foundation
141 Greene Street
New York, NY 10012
tel 212.777.4490

Copyright © 1997-2025 Aesthetic Realism Foundation

MENU
  • Home
  • Periodical (TRO)
    • Current Issue
    • Drama & Acting
    • Literature & Poetry
    • Love
    • Mind
    • Music
    • Teaching Method
    • The Visual Arts
    • Archive
  • Poetry
    • Poems by Eli Siegel
      • Short Poems
      • Civil War Poems
    • Translations with Notes
    • Poets: Their Lives & Works
    • What Poetry Really Is
    • The Critical Muse
    • Critics Speak
    • A Celebration of Poetry
    • Poetry of Martha Baird
  • Books
  • Essays
  • Lectures
  • Definitions
  • Reviews
  • News Archive
    • Educational Method
    • Love & the Family
    • Art & Life
    • More Issues of Our Time
  • The Eli Siegel Collection
  • Aesthetic Realism Fdn.
  • Terrain Gallery