A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 13 The First Stirrings of Modernism (Rimbaud and Hopkins).

 Rimbaud's sonnet is so powerfully moving  I can read it again and again.  But for poetry in English, no one is as powerful as Hopkins at his best, just as for drama Shakespeare is, for the novel, Dickens, maybe, for prose, Joyce and for fantasy Tolkien. Hopkins might be too rich and for years I stayed away from him as my literary mentor said he had a tinkle in his words that irritated him, my mentor being more the R S Thomas kind, whom too I love but RS Thomas and Dylan Thomas/Hopkins come from two extreme ends of the poetic spectrum. Hopkins is not just a complete poet but an inventor, a discoverer, an explorer like James Joyce and and Eliot or an RS Thomas are only complete poets with no add ons.

Take "Pied Beauty."

Some people say it has only ten and a half lines, in terms of metre, and some say eleven, but what manner of radical, extreme thinking would imagine up an idea that a sonnet can be curtailed to create an eleven line one that can be called a curtal sonnet. Only a genius, obviously. But the poem first:

Pied Beauty 

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

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 áll trádes, 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.

1. He expands our vocabulary and knowledge of poetic technique as well as diction and various other things with words like pied (a pun), dappled (seldom used, freshly used, a favourite word of Hopkins'), brinded (never used before or after, perhaps), rose-moles (neologism and compounding), stipple (newly used), fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls (compounding of a very unlikely kind to form a four-word combine into an almost single word), fallow (noun made out of adjective), fold (pun as noun and verb), plough ( metonymy), áll trádes (look at the use of those accents for bringing in sprung rhythm!), trim ( original usage), counter (half-word to mean opposite to or running counter to), fickle (changing) freckled (who would use a world like this in a poem in such a place or juncture), adazzle (Why the a? To add a syllable obviously), dim (in the shadow), and fathers-forth (neologism/compounding) 

Inscape is there, definitely, into/of Pied Beauty, and instress too of "fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls" , which when imagined is awe-inspiringly creative, though not as much as the AND in Windhover. Duns Scotus was never this interesting.

What about the metre? No more the mouldy iambic for Hopkins but one entirely his own.where each line can have any number of unstressed syllables or unaccented ones but must have the same accented ones or stressed ones as all other lines of the sonnet so the rhythm is immaculate like the Virgin he worships. Immaculate and impeccable rhythm, beat, metronome, it dances along or marches along like none other and can be done only by him and was never before or has not been attempted ever after!

To come back to the poem as sonnet or poem what we have here is a mini tour de force where Hopkins does everything with titling, imagery, figures of speech, and sound devices that other poets do and just as well but adds to it like a cake with many terraced layers, and as for what he does with meaning or structure or rhyme scheme or form it is simply explosive and implosive.  His superstructure is amazingly, decadently, a riotous affair, one that makes up more than enough for his austerity in his philosophy that is unmistakably Jesuit and monastic, ascetic, and ashram-based! This is cake with frills, garnishing, bows, geegaws, toppings, cherries, patterns, and totally designer!

Let's have a brief look at the rhyme scheme. Abc, abc, dbc, dc. Intricate and interlocking. Simple to/but "it's complicated". And the alliteration, it is so full of assonance and consonance. As for the images, visual (rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim) and auditory (the packed, breathless alliteration and the rhyme scheme that stands for the pied and dappled nature of beauty and things) and kinetic (swift, slow), as well as tactile (rose-moles) and gustatory (sweet, sour), and the figures of speech that are implicit and explicit metaphors (pied, dappled - showing the binary nature of existence)  and metonymy, and a single simile (as a brinded cow), as well as personification (God as father) and the stanza break for structure etc., it is all exquisite. We are in the presence of a master who has just broken the pattern of the sonnet open and blown our heads off, in the bargain, teaching us the true beauty of what poetry really means! And finally, the meanings that collide into one another and blow your head off, running counter, spare, strange, original, no matter how! Praise it!

At the back of Hopkins' mind is the Psalms, no doubt, with a verse like "the heavens declare the glory of God" and Shakespeare's "oh, what a piece of work is man", but there is also Keats with his "beauty is truth and truth, beauty' that is all ye know and all ye need to know on earth" as well as "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Hopkins is agreeing but also going beyond it, or countering it, when he says" He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change." Philosophically, it is to put Being above, or as transcendental to, its outcomes, even ones like Beauty.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44399/pied-