2021 Post #2 -- Poetic Definitions

 by Brett Vogelsinger

Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the few poets whose work rings in my head every now and then ever since I first encountered his work in college.  Every year in April when the world is flourishing back to life, I hear the words "when weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush" and the sheer abundance of alliteration in his description of spring makes my heart sing a little.  

"Pied Beauty" is another poem that sticks with me years after first reading it.  I remember my professor elaborating on this poem -- a celebration of things that are speckled and spotted, not black-and-white, cut-and-dried -- about how remarkable it is that a Catholic priest wrote this poem, in a time when there was little tolerance of ambiguity.  

Since the poem is in the public domain, I can present it here: 

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 all trades, 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.

The Hopkins Poetry website attaches the images of a speckled trout and a brindled cow to the poem, helping students to observe the pattern of each of the things Hopkins praises. 

In truth, the word "pied" always threw me off a bit in this poem. I figured it must be related to the word "piety," given the references to God in the poem, but in reality, it simply means this: "having two or more different colors; synonyms: variegated, multicolored, tabby."  

So after sharing the dictionary definition of this term with my students, I might say, "wouldn't it be fun to create our own, poetic definition of a word in addition to the dictionary definition?  We can take the real definition and make it sound more like a poem.  Or even imagine a different shade of meaning.  For instance, I might take this definition of "pied" and write something like this . . ."

pied (adj) -- defying a simple category or binary, complicated and beautiful and stronger because of its ambiguity

Have students select another word from this poem -- adazzle or fickle or fallow -- perhaps words they do not know too well.  Google search a dictionary definition to copy into their writer's notebooks, but then create a poetic definition for the word too, a variation, a speckled kind of denotation based on their understanding of the poem.  How is it different, maybe even better than the first?  

If you really feel like going deep: What would Gerard Manley Hopkins think of us expanding the definition of a word, and how can you tell this from the poem? 

Further Reading: 

 

Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth-grade English teacher at Holicong Middle School in Bucks County, PA.  He has been starting class with a poem each day for the past ten years. He is the creator of the Go Poems blog and the author of Poetry Pauses: Teaching With Poems to Elevate Writing in All Genres.   Find him on Twitter @theVogelman.