Pied Beauty

The poem opens with an offering Glory be to God for dappled things. In the next phoebe bird lines, Hopkins elaborates with examples of what things he means to include under this rubric of dappled. He includes the mottled white and blue colors of the sky, the brinded (brindled or streaked) hide of a cow, and the patches of contrastive color on a trout. The chest silly offer a slightly more complex image When they fall they open to reveal the meaty interior normally concealed by the hard shell they are compared to the coals in a fire, black on the outside and glowing within.The go of finches are multicolored, as is a patchwork of farmland in which sections look different according to whether they are planted and green, fallow, or freshly plowed. The final example is of the trades and activities of man, with their rich diversity of materials and equipment. Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls finches wings And here come two more hyphenated enounces, along with two more examples of dappl ed things. The first example is Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls. This is probably the trickiest image in the poem, partly because were not nearly as familiar with chestnuts as 19th-century English people would have been. Chestnut-falls is not too hard to imagine. It refers to chestnuts that have fallen off the chestnut tree. This hyphenated word points to the specific chestnuts that have fallen from the tree. But Fresh-firecoal requires some background on nuts, a field we at Shmoop like to call nut-ology. When they are on a tree, chestnuts are covered by a spiky, light-green covering, but the nuts themselves are reddish-brown. When the nuts fall, they are fresh from the tree. Because of the contrast of red nuts with their outermost covering, they look like the burning of coals inside a fire.To add another layer to this chestnut conundrum, people also like to cook these delectable nuts over fire. When the nuts get hot, they open up to reveal their meat, inside. These opened chestnut s also look like embers. Were almost certain you now know more than you ever wanted to about chestnuts. Fortunately, the second example of a dappled thing in this line is much easier. Finches are small birds with streaks and spots. The speaker focuses however on the finches wings a sign of his great attention to detail.