Pied Beauty, praise for dappled things

Hopkins wrote Pied Beauty in 1877. Almost none of his poems appeared in his lifetime, and his friend Robert Bridges published the collected Poems in 1918. Hopkins marked stresses with accents to show what he called sprung rhythm, and those marks stand in the printed text. Wikisource carries the 1918 edition.

Where this text comes fromAlmost nothing Hopkins wrote was printed while he was alive. He died in 1889 and the collected Poems did not appear until 1918, put together by his friend Robert Bridges, so the edition linked below stands twenty-nine years after the author and reflects Bridges’s decisions about what the manuscripts meant. That gap is why the punctuation here can look arbitrary: it is an editor reading handwriting, not a poet correcting proofs. What you copy is the first half, the catalog of spotted and streaked things.

What you might not noticeThe poem was written in 1877 but reached print in 1918, which means it spent forty-one years unpublished before anyone outside a small circle of friends had read a line of it. Source

What it trainsSixteen punctuation marks crowd into 282 characters: four semicolons, three commas, a colon, an apostrophe, one full stop and six hyphens, two of which stand for long dashes in the source. Nothing else in this corpus packs marks that tightly. The four semicolons and all six hyphens sit on the base level of the US layout; the colon is the one mark here that shares a key with the semicolon and has to be lifted onto it. The hyphens are doing real work rather than decorating, because Hopkins built his own compounds and they have to be typed exactly as he made them: couple-colour, rose-moles, Fresh-firecoal, chestnut-falls. The last two run fourteen characters each. Seven capitals appear, six of them inside sentences.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource