“Pied Beauty” was written by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877, but—like so much of his work—wasn’t published until 1918, 30 years after his death, as a part of the collection Poems, which was edited by his close friend Robert Bridges. The poem praises God for the beauty he has created in the form of the natural world. This poem is one of Hopkins’ “curtal sonnets,” a form he invented. The curtal sonnet follows the basic pattern of a Petrarchan sonnet but the octave becomes a sestet and the sestet becomes a quatrain with an extra "tail piece" attached.
Hopkins is known today as one of the great innovators of English poetry, particularly for his use of ‘sprung rhythm,’ another of his idiosyncratic forms, which appears in much of his most famous work. Like his most famous poem, “The Windhover,” Hopkins wrote "Pied Beauty" in 1877, the same year that he was ordained as a Jesuit priest. This context no doubt informs the poem’s psalm-like structure and content, as well as its apparent subordination of the function of poetry to the devotional.
