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This article analyzes Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Pied Beauty" through the lens of Impressionist art. It argues that the visual descriptions in the poem reflect Impressionist techniques like emphasizing contrasting colors, abstracting forms, and presenting fleeting optical impressions. The public was hostile to Impressionism in Hopkins' time, as they were to unconventional artists like Turner, Whistler, and Monet. However, Hopkins uses Impressionist techniques to revolutionize the reader's perception of beauty and praise God as the ultimate artist behind nature's patterns.

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62 views4 pages

West Virginia University Press: Info/about/policies/terms - JSP

This article analyzes Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Pied Beauty" through the lens of Impressionist art. It argues that the visual descriptions in the poem reflect Impressionist techniques like emphasizing contrasting colors, abstracting forms, and presenting fleeting optical impressions. The public was hostile to Impressionism in Hopkins' time, as they were to unconventional artists like Turner, Whistler, and Monet. However, Hopkins uses Impressionist techniques to revolutionize the reader's perception of beauty and praise God as the ultimate artist behind nature's patterns.

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Nasrullah Mambrol
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Seeing "Pied Beauty": A Key to Theme and Structure

Author(s): Amy Lowenstein


Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 64-66
Published by: West Virginia University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40001861
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SEEING "PIED BEAUTY":
A KEY TO THEME AND STRUCTURE

Amy Lowenstein

As Francis Fike suggests, there is room for further exploration of Hopkins'


relation to the art of painting.1 Hopkins' belief that poetry and painting are
closely allied, that "inscape" or patterning is, to use Fike's word, "crucial" to
both, sanctions such endeavors; but aside from Hopkins' complaint to Bridges
about Millais' lack of "feeling for beauty in abstract design," there is little in
the comments about painting that illuminates the distinctive quality of a
poem like "Pied Beauty."
Unlike the popular paintings of its day, the visual art in "Pied Beauty" is
neither anecdotal nor literary. In itself, it is free of ideas or sentiment, and is
constructed from optical data alone. The element of contrast, lights and darks
particularly, is abstracted and presented instead of a whole object. A
two-dimensional quality stresses surfaces rather than plastic form. The
pictures are presented in rapid succession so that their transitory nature is
intensified; the eye jumps from one to the next, taking in the alternating
brushstrokes within each panel as well as the alternating images as they flash
by.
These characteristics belong to Impressionist art which, at about
mid-century, had begun to isolate the optical from the conceptual elements
of experience. The first collective exhibition was one hundred years ago
(1874), and, as I write, the centenary is being celebrated in Paris with an
exhibition of the kind of academic painting shown that year in stern
opposition to the new movement.2 Now that Impressionism is part of the
Establishment, "we are unable even to imagine," says Arnold Hauser, "how
helplessly the public confronted this medley of spots and blots"; he
comments further, "the feeling of being jeered at may never have been so
strong."3
A similar feeling is unmistakable in Hopkins' well-known comment to
Bridges that an artist who is true to his "inscape" or his own distinctive
patterning risks becoming queer. In England Turner had been a target of
public derision before Ruskin's spirited defense turned the tide. Twenty years
later Monet, whose debt to Turner is established, exhibited his painting of a
sunrise, "Impressions," a title which was applied derisively to a movement.

1 "Gerard Manley Hopkins' Interest in Painting after 1868," VP, 8 (1970), 315-333.
2"Salon des acceptes," TLS; June 21, 1974, p. 668.
^Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman (London, 1951), II, 875, 879.

64

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AMY LOWENSTEIN I 65

And in 1877, the year Hopkins composed "Pied Beauty," the jeering went
on, this time against Whistler whose "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The
Failing Rocket" owed much to the Impressionist imagination. Ruskin's
accusation that Whistler was "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face"4
carried such weight that the famous Whistler v. Ruskin libel suit resulted.
Certainly the tenets of Impressionism and the resistance to them were
"in the air" as Hopkins "painted" "Pied Beauty," and there is no doubt that
he was aware that he, too, was presenting images in a new way and that the
new way was not a popular depiction of beauty. We are educated by the
Impressionists and their heirs, the Neo- and Post-Impressionists, and can
respond as Hopkins' contemporaries could not to "dappled things," pur-
posely imprecise, immediately suggesting a fleeting world of sunlight and
shadow. The "skies of couple -colour," huge alternating brushstrokes, them-
selves alternate strangely and unexpectedly with an image of a streaked,
spotted cow. The pointillist description of the trout, like the work of Seurat,
emphasizes color contrast within form; yet it is not static- the trout "swim,"
the "finches' wings" flash by (their bandings of light and dark a possible
association with the term for a streaked cow, "finch-backed"), the sparks
shower down from the roasting chestnuts (Whistler's "Falling Rocket" in
little?). The patched landscape with its diverse forms in field and fold, tool
and plow, is not unfamiliar to sensibilities developed by Monet, Van Gogh,
and Cezanne. And beyond the shifting, transitory quality of the designs
themselves, their presentation in rapid succession, linked by the eye alone,
breaks the world of experience into moments of delight in contrasts and
forms abstracted from natural phenomena.
Nevertheless, these images, which are in themselves free from any
emotion except the joy of translating sense experience into art, have a
rhetorical as well as a deeply religious frame. The "argument" of the poem
moves from the first line where the poet alone praises God for the beauty of
"dappled things," to the last line in which the "viewer" is asked to join in
such praise. Between these lines a series of images is presented which
revolutionizes perception. In the penultimate line, "He fathers-forth whose
beauty is past change," Hopkins sees God as the consummate harmonizer, the
ideal artist in perfect control over his darting, speckled, freckled, spotted,
striped, contrasting phenomena in all their transitory beauty. The greatest
Impressionist, whose light dapples the world's landscape, is, paradoxically,
beyond the impermanence, beyond time and change, perpetually avant-garde.
Hopkins' visual images, abstracted from life, are returned to the source of life,
but not before those who now have eyes to see, shocked out of their

*Fors Clavigera, July 2, 1877 (The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and
Alexander Wedderburn [London, 1907] , XXIX, 160).

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66 / VICTORIAN POETRY

Victorian ideas of prettiness, have redefined beauty, and are therefore able,
along with the artist, to "Praise him."

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