Dappled Glory: Gerard Manley Hopkins

The first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty” is an incredibly well-known one: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” The reader necessarily wonders: what is it about dappled things that are especially worthy of praise? Hopkins spends the rest of the stanza describing these pied or dappled things: “skies of couple-color 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” (lines 2-5), including so many images that would not normally be placed together. The sky, cows, trout, chestnuts, birds’ wings, farmed landscapes: these images are some animal, some vegetable, and some mineral. I find the image of the “landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough” (line 5) to be perhaps most interesting, since it describes not natural outdoor beauty but something man-made. A fallow field could often be taken to represent man’s corruption of God’s created beauty, since man had to take his rusty tools to the land and dig it up in order to produce his crops. Yet Hopkins counts its dappled beauty among that of shining trout and the beautiful fluttering wings of finches.

In short, Hopkins praises God for “Whatever is fickle, freckled,” and imperfect (line 8). He may be insinuating that the very dapples that render these objects apparently imperfect are, in Hopkins’ mind, what makes them even more beautiful. In wisdom, God chose to give some things freckles and spots, and leave some things without. Though that seems a simple, even an insignificant, choice, Hopkins wishes his readership to know that he sees the beauty in this imperfection.

However, even if “dappled” is not intended to represent imperfection, I see as the point of Hopkins’ choosing that particular trait to communicate to his reader that to focus on all of God’s beauty would be an insurmountably large task. Instead, even only focusing on “things counter, original, spare, strange,” and dappled (line 7), Hopkins still finds so much there that he can scarcely express his gratitude and amazement at it all. He must narrow down creation to even attempt to describe or appropriately glorify it; still there is so much beauty that even as masterful an artist as Hopkins cannot remotely express it. God “whose beauty is past change” can still change so much in the world, and he does so for the sheer glory of it (line 10). Ultimately, Hopkins’ reaction to all the “dappled things” in the world, from clouded skies to fallow fields, is to implore his reader: “Praise him” who made those things, and who continues to produce in all ways elements of his glory (line 12).

Unrequited Love: Yeats

Helen of Troy, famously the most beautiful woman in the world, merits varying descriptions as to her role in the entire Trojan War. It was she who began the whole war by leaving her husband for another man, thus causing the two men to fight; however, perhaps her beauty made her role in the war a foregone conclusion, rather than a mistake on her part. William Butler Yeats uses this ambiguity to describe his own Helen—named Maud Gonne—and her effect upon him. He begins his “No Second Troy” by musing, “Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery?” (lines 1-2). Maud cannot help her beauty or that men desire it, just as Helen of Troy could not help but be desired. No matter a beautiful woman’s decisions, even if she is the chastest woman in the world, her beauty can cause problems. When Yeats remarks that “she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways” (lines 2-3), he may be speaking not of her having actually taught violence, but rather her beauty inspiring a sort of violence in him: a violence that kills not other men, but himself.

Ultimately Yeats decides that her character, regrettably, is unchangeable: “What could have made her peaceful with a mind / That nobleness made simple as a fire?” (lines 6-7). Her mind has “fire” in it, not peace as Yeats would wish her to have. Her beauty—along with all her other positive qualities—are nothing if the bad qualities remain forever. He even begins describing her beauty as less than ideal: her beauty is “like a tightened bow, a kind / That is not natural” (lines 8-9). A tightened bow is a cause for alarm, as it could shoot at any moment, killing or wounding anyone. Her beauty is like Helen’s: Helen must have enjoyed her beauty in her youth, getting preferential treatment and always being told of her loveliness, but once the “tightened bow” of Helen’s beauty went off, creating the situation with Paris described in Homer’s The Iliad, then she must well have wished that she had never been beautiful. Yeats regrets his lovely Maud being “high and solitary and most stern,” rather than pleasing to more than just the eye (line 10). Yet he knows, as he muses, “Why, what could she have done, being what she is?” (line 11), that it is not truly Maud’s fault that she inspired such churning emotions within him, just as it is not her fault that she is eternally unsatisfied with love and life, as Helen was.

However, since there is not “another Troy for her to burn” (line 12), Yeats’ Maud must burn something else: the poet himself. Yeats apparently proposed to her multiple times, being refused every single one of them (1116). As far as he is concerned, his Helen does not need a whole city to watch burn, since she has him. A cold beauty, hotly desired but determined to remain distant, Maud Gonne has beauty like a “tightened bow,” ready to go off at any time with unpredictable consequences. And like the situation with Helen, Yeats—like Paris—knows better than to get involved with such a woman, but he does so anyway, to his own disastrous consequence.

The Unsaved Magi: T. S. Eliot

Though T. S. Eliot’s dense writing makes his “Journey of the Magi” difficult to understand—though it is clearly more accessible than his more famous “The Waste Land”—it clearly bears many differences to the Biblical tale of the Magi. Eliot relies on some Biblical imagery, notably describing “three trees on the low sky” (line 24), an obvious reference to the circumstances of Jesus’ eventual death, where he is crucified on a hill with two other men. When the Magi go to the tavern, they see “Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver” (line 27), which seems to recall both the Roman soldiers “dicing,” or gambling, for Jesus’ clothes as well as Judas’ betrayal of Jesus for nothing more than “pieces of silver.”

When the Magi arrive, they do not get the answers that they seek, and leave still wondering: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” (lines 35-36). Of course, they went to see a birth, Jesus’ birth, but the speaker fearfully acknowledges that “this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death” (lines 38-39). Perhaps these Magi represent some of the many who came in contact with Jesus and did not personally believe in him as the son of God, which would be a great cause for disillusionment indeed. All of this contrasts with the Biblical description of the Magi: Matthew 2:10 of the New International Version states that “When they saw the star, they were overjoyed,” and Eliot’s Magi do not seem like those who would be overjoyed. In fact, Eliot does everything possible to remind his reader of death rather than life throughout the poem. All of the Christ symbolism and imagery are those images surrounding his death: his crucifixion, the gambling for his clothes, Judas betraying him. Nowhere does Eliot include references to Jesus’ many supposed miracles or his loving ministry while on earth; instead, the Magi see nothing but references to Christ’s death.

Perhaps because of all these references, they “should be glad of another death” by the end of having been with Jesus (line 43). Instead of the story in the Bible, where the Magi joyfully returned to their lands by another route, after seeing a vision from God to that effect (Matthew 2:12), these Magi “returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here,” in the place that Jesus has apparently come to save (lines 40-41). I wonder, at this poem’s end, why the Magi came at all: the Bible tells that they happily sought the Savior so that they could give him gifts of their own free will, but Eliot’s account tells neither of gifts nor happiness. Instead, the Magi describe their suffering as cold, long, and unrelenting, with “the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, / And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly / And the villages dirty and charging high prices” (lines 13-15). Eliot’s continual use of polysyndeton—the many times he uses “and”—seems to prolong the sentence itself, leading to a heightened awareness of the remorseless suffering that these Magi suffered. Perhaps they only began the journey because of King Herod, as related in the Bible, though Eliot’s poem also says nothing of Herod’s commands. Whatever their reasons for coming to the birthplace of Christ, they do not leave changed men: instead, they leave uneasy, and the fact that this poem is supposed to have been written much later (“All this was a long time ago, I remember” (line 32)) only makes it more clear that, despite their persistence in our nativity scenes and quaint Christmas stories, the Magi are not among those to whom Jesus granted salvation during his tenure on the earth.

Fighting the Angel: Virginia Woolf

At the time of Virginia Woolf’s writing, a modern woman was so different from women of the past that Woolf—as modern a woman as could be—felt as though her struggle against becoming a docile, passive creature like her foremothers should best be compared to a literal battle to the death. Woolf describes herself as nothing more than “a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand,” any ordinary woman. Her only achievement, simple as it is, has been “to move that pen from left to right—from ten o’clock to one.” In doing so, Woolf brands herself as an average woman. She is not a writer as such; she is merely a woman who occasionally writes. Still describing herself, Woolf relates the process of publication: “Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all—to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner.” Her becoming a writer is a series of chance decisions, then, and nothing highly intentional or artistic.

Far more difficult than writing, continues Woolf, is her discovery “that if [she] were going to review books [she] should need to do battle with a certain phantom.” This phantom, as she calls it, is the ghost of women past: quiet, unassuming women who would never dream of putting down their own ideas on paper. Woman, in popular belief, was “intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily,” and she did all of it joyfully. Any wife and mother became, automatically and without being asked, one of these women—these Angels in the House—and “every house had its Angel.” From the beginning, Woolf acknowledges that this Angel is her enemy. The Angel whispers in Woolf’s ear as she writes: “‘Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” Out of this seduction into traditional femininity, Woolf describes her reaction as “the one act for which [she] takes some credit to [herself]”: she battles the Angel, the ghost of all that society calls her to be. Writing, getting published, even buying her cat were not really acts of her own doing, but this—killing the Angel that haunts her—is.

Woolf, however, continued to be haunted by this apparition, as “Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her.” The ideal of the Angel, so deeply ingrained into people of society as to be almost indistinguishable from truth, cannot fall easily. In the conclusion to this short excerpt Woolf redefines herself, saying that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” At the start—less than a page earlier—Woolf firmly characterizes herself to be a woman who writes, not a woman writer. She claims that her writing and even publication are sort of happy accidents that help her to live comfortably, but do not define her. After her battle with the Angel in the House, the fateful battle that would determine Woolf’s attitude toward modern women including herself, she defines herself anew: “a woman writer,” she says, solidly placing the word “writer” as noun and “woman” as descriptor. The one event able to turn “a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand” into, at last, “a woman writer,” was not writing itself: rather, it was the decision of what to do with the looming shadow, ever present, of the Angel in the House and the popular conception of femininity.

Happiness in a Blue Stone: William Butler Yeats

On the eve of World War II, during a time when life was uncertain and the English tendency was toward depressing modernity, William Butler Yeats remarks in his “Lapis Lazuli” of “hysterical women [who] say / They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, / Of poets that are always gay” (lines 1-3). In these cynical times, modern folk had grown apparently tired of constant gaiety, and they felt the poets and artists to be the ones who most espoused this hated trait. According to the popular mentality, “everybody knows or else should know / That if nothing drastic is done,” terrible things will happen (lines 4-5). Of course, in the midst of this atmosphere, where everyday people are faced with the threat of “Aeroplane and Zeppelin” (line 6) and “King Billy bomb-balls” falling from the sky and flattening towns and people (line 7), it is understandable why poetic gaiety—seen as frivolous, even indecent—might be frowned upon.

However, Yeats argues, the poetic cannot help it. Even those who “perform their tragic play” (line 9), like the characters in famed tragedies as Hamlet and King Lear, cannot truly feel tragic because of the very nature of art itself. If these actors are “worthy [of] their prominent part in the play, / [they] Do not break up their lines to weep” (lines 14-15). Indeed, even “Hamlet and Lear are gay” (line 16), refusing to succumb to the tragedies that they represent. Something about art itself, then, leads to gaiety; the fact that these men play those whom they are not, walking about a curtained stage and learning a part, wearing fancy dress and stage makeup, renders them incapable of true tragedy. And even “[t]hough Hamlet rambles and Lear rages” (line 21), neither feels the imminent war, the shortage of food and supplies, or the prevailing cynical mindset, so each is gay.

Portentous of the war—perhaps with World War I in his mind—Yeats assures his readership that “All things fall and are built again,” over and over throughout history (line 35). Great civilizations, small civilizations, ancient cities and modern ones, have all been felled and rebuilt. Once rebuilt, as would be the case with the War that would start within just a few years, they are destined to someday fall again and be rebuilt again. However, Yeats joyfully acknowledges that, universally, “those that build them again are gay,” not somber, in doing so (line 36). The “hysterical women” of line 1 who condemn gaiety simply do not consider its repercussions: without the relentless gaiety of the 1920s, for example, the American and English societies would still be in ruins. Yeats puts it upon himself, the poet, to remain gay even in the face of war, death, and hysterical women.

Yeats recounts a beautiful artistic piece that he has been given, depicting “Two Chinamen, behind them a third / . . . carved in Lapis Lazuli, / Over them flies a long-legged bird / A symbol of longevity” (lines 37-40). This lovely craft-piece is, ultimately, pointless: it will not feed or clothe anyone, and is merely to look at and enjoy. Those cynics who denounce gaiety would likely disapprove of its very existence, let alone a poet’s glorification of it. And so Yeats describes it in great detail, saying how to him “Every discolouration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent / Seems a water-course or an avalanche” (lines 43-45). He studies this stone and projects meaning into even its cracks and faults. Yeats imagines further meaning into the men it depicts, “[delighting] to imagine them seated” at a small temple (line 50), worshiping, as “One asks for mournful melodies; / Accomplished fingers begin to play” for the men, enrapturing them (53-54). These melodies, like the performances of Hamlet and Lear, are “mournful” in nature, though players and listeners alike derive joy from them. Of the Chinamen on the stone, “Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay” (lines 55-56). These men, literally as ancient as the stone itself, know enough to be gay in spite of their long journey and all their hardships. Yeats ends with this implicit lesson to the “hysterical women”: gaiety is not a measure of idiocy or naïveté, but rather of wisdom and art.

Pure Cynicism: The Corrupting War of Siegfried Sassoon

If Rupert Brooke writes to show the good of war, then Siegfried Sassoon has got the bad and ugly combined. His poem “Glory of Women” clearly aims to depict the war as hideous, self-defeating, and futile. The war is to him so repugnant that he must use women—traditionally symbols of virtuousness and goodness—to convey the war’s ultimately corrupting influence.

The women “love us when we’re heroes, home on leave, / Or wounded in a mentionable place” (lines 1-2), writes Sassoon, sneeringly insinuating that the women (and, by extension, all living in countries at war who are not a part of the war), though claiming to dread and fear the war, really relish in it. These naïve women “worship decorations . . . believe / That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace” (lines 3-4). What is worse, however, they “listen with delight, / By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled” as told by their soldiers (lines 5-6). These bloodthirsty women are not the fair prim conservative lasses of yesteryear; they believe at least as much in the glory of a bloody war as their sons and husbands. However, this poem is intended to be about war, not women. I believe that Sassoon uses women as his symbol because they have historically been viewed as morally above men, incorruptible and pure. If a war can turn a woman into a cruel glorifier of death, then its effect on men must be immeasurable, in other words.

The poem’s ending lines provide an interesting twist to the poem, as Sassoon speaks suddenly to another woman affected by the war: “O German mother dreaming by the fire, / While you are knitting socks to send your son / His face is trodden deeper in the mud” (lines 12-15). The German mother, like the women who “make us shells” (line 5), uses her creative and productive energy to fuel a war that she does not know anything about. Her efforts are futile, since her son is “trodden deeper in the mud,” and already dead. This ending suggests that the similar earlier line about women making shells is equally futile an enterprise: they produce shells because they think that they will help, when truly this conflict and the men involved in it are beyond help.

Like Brooke’s “The Soldier,” Sassoon’s poem is addressed to the loved ones: the mothers, sisters, and wives of soldiers. In both poems, the mention of the women is nothing more than a vehicle to get across the poet’s idea of war. Sassoon would have been familiar with Brooke’s poetry, since by 1917 it was already quite famous. Knowing the convention of addressing reassuring epistles to unknowing women, he may have decided to address his more realistic ideas of war to the women as well. Sassoon clearly uses some shocking imagery: he depicts women listening in glee as they hear how “British troops ‘retire’ / When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run, / Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood” (lines 9-11). These women love the stories of war not because they are inherently vicious or murderous, but because society has made them that way: a war-glorifying country has corrupted its every vestige of purity, even its mothers and daughters, to become like men: morally formless, increasingly disillusioned, and worshipful of a war that does no-one any good.

Self-Delusion: The Beautiful War of Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke’s 1915 poem “The Soldier” may have been just what the boys of England needed to get through the war. The poem portrays not the loud, clanging glory of the battlefield, but a different kind of war-glory: a quieter kind that persists long after the war is over, and long after some boys have gone home while others remain forever. Brooke’s poem is addressed to the loved ones of the speaker, who is a soldier; the poem is, then, spoken entirely to his wife, family, or close friends. He calmly acknowledges his own imminent death, but not to focus on himself; rather, he intends to instruct his loved ones on what to do: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England” (lines 1-3). The scariest part of any war throughout the ages has always been the sense of ceasing to be. On a personal level, the young man in question will die. But countries, ideologies, revolutions, cultures, and ways of life are all truly mortal, and never more so than during wartime. But Brooke reassures his audience that England, unlike all those mortal, worry-filled boys on the lines, can never die, since “some corner of a foreign field,” unnamed and unmarked, will nevertheless be “forever England,” and it will forever espouse English beliefs and ideals. By this poem’s inception, cynicism had already entered the war, and it would be long years before the war came to a close. But Rupert Brooke’s nameless soldier does not let those thoughts enter into his mind; he merely reminds himself and his loved ones that England is more important than any of them.

Along with the immortality of England comes its glorification through praise. The speaker of this poem is a righteous, patriotic, upstanding citizen who is worthy of public admiration; however, he credits his country with all. He claims himself nothing more than “A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, / Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam” (lines 5-6). All of this boy’s goodness and greatness he owes to a country even more good and great that made him that way. Love for his country, gratefulness at having been “A body of England’s, breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home” (lines 7-8), and awe at merely being allowed to represent England in the great conflict all enable this speaker to reassure his family so much.

Brooke ignores the realistically bloody parts of war, however. His speaker “shall be / In that rich earth a richer dust concealed” (lines 3-4), saying nothing of the mangled, disfigured, bloody corpses that actually lay strewn about the battlefield. By the end of the poem, the man is nothing more than his “heart, all evil shed away, / A pulse in the Eternal mind” (lines 9-10). In truth, bodies piled high littered the battlefield, as shown in photos and in more realistic descriptions of the war. Brooke, however, chooses to ignore that gritty reality so that he can focus instead on the poetic, even beautiful parts of war. Dying, for him, is a chance to “[give] somewhere back the thoughts by England given, / Her sights and sounds; / dreams happy as her day” (lines 11-12), an opportunity at which he elates. The final line of the poem labels the man as a “[heart] at peace, under an English heaven” (line 14). In truth, it is the man’s now-useless body, lying gory and lifeless with no-one to comfort him, who lies under the supposed “English heaven.” Yet the speaker’s instructions were clear from the beginning: his loved ones should “think only this” and nothing more of him: that, however terrible his conditions of life or death may be, that he is forever England, which is forever strong.