Ambiguity In Pied Beauty

Tension, Paradox and Extremist Ambiguity in G. M. Hopkins’s Personal Assertions of Christian Faith

Pied Beauty ; No Worst. There is None (a technical New Criticism analysis)

New Critics seek what raises to universality the concrete structures of texts and single out overall markers of ambiguity, irony, paradox, and tension as the hubs of literary texts. They focus on individual texts and on texts’ structure/devices/coherence/autonomy to deduce/discover in action how literature itself functioned autonomously in unique structures. (Zirra, Second Lecture in Concepts of Literary Criticism and Theory)

In the school of literary theory called “New Criticism” in the 1930s and later, the word tension refers more specifically to the quality of balanced

Each poem by Hopkins is a verbal act of inspiration caught in action.

(Zirra, Ioana, Contributions of the British 19th Century- the Victorian Age-to the History of Literature and Ideas.)

The Analysis of Pied Beauty

Pied Beauty is a lyric poem that praises God for his creation. It is a curtal sonnet, as the author called the poem, because it contains eleven lines instead of the usual fourteen for the standard Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet.

According to Kevin Heller, the use of various poetic devices in Hopkins’s Pied Beauty causes the words of his poem to take on a new meaning. By alluding to common prayers and manipulating both sound effect and stanza form, Hopkins makes his poem itself an example of pied beauty. It is pied, ordered and beautiful and is an imitation of the creative act of God written to praise him in the form of a poem-prayer.

The poem begins with the paraphrased Latin motto of the Jesuits in English (“Ad majoram Dei Gloriam” = “To the greater glory of God”). The theme of the poem is nature and the beauty and wonder of the world that God

The Analysis of No Worst. There is None

No Worst. There is None is one of the poems that date from 1885 and is referred to as his “terrible sonnets”.

The “Sonnets of Desolation” or “Terrible Sonnets” are a group of untitled poems probably written during 1885-1886. These poems were found after his death.

The poem presents agony in its purest form, sorrow and physical pain. The first part of the poem represents the inscape, the landscape of his own mind, while the second part is the instress representing the meditation and the energy selected by the object.

The word “wring” from the second line has here the meaning of a tight and painful squeezing or twisting. By this we understand that his mental pain and exhausting is beyond the ordinary grief.

The ambiguity of the word “pitch” from the first line of the poem is effective in that the word can mean “thrown” and it could also refer to the level of a note in music. “Pitch” also suggests tension beyond the normal level of grief, because all order is broken here.

“Fury” can also be understood in two ways: either in religious terms as the “God of Righteousness” or as the power of truth expressing