Pied Beauty

From a literary point-of-view, Hopkins is something of an innovator. Even though his work was not largely published until after his death, Hopkins’s poetry was highly regarded by many of the poetic greats of the 20th century, including T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. As a poet, Hopkins contributed several stylistic inventions to the world of verse. Sprung rhythm—as illustrated in “Pied Beauty”—is one of his primary contributions; sprung rhythm imitates the sounds and natural movements of human speech, and it stands in contradiction to the commonly-used meter of the time, which tended to focus on specific numbers of syllables. In contrast, sprung rhythm is called “accentual verse” because it focuses more on the stresses themselves, allowing for variable numbers of unstressed syllables.

Hopkins’s creation and use of sprung rhythm was largely inspired by his belief in English linguistic purism. Hopkins was a student of Old English and Welsh, and it was his belief that English writing should focus more wholly on its immediate linguistic roots. Hopkins’s interest in linguistic purism colored his poetic style; he relied heavily on stresses, alliteration, internal rhyme, and other sound devices that are commonly found in Old English poetry. Rather than following the typical formal and metrical schemes of the time, Hopkins’s work focuses more thoroughly on sound. For its rebellion from the constraints of pre-Modernist metrical verse, Hopkins’s work is considered the precursor to free verse, a poetic style popularized by Modernist and Postmodernist poets in the 20th and 21st centuries. Hopkins’s unique use of sound and language marks him as a likely bridge between the Victorian poets and the Modernists.