Pied Beauty by Gerald Manley Hopkins: an analysis

Gerald Manley Hopkins brought into the world of poetry some new methods and theories of his own. A few of them are used in his poem Pied Beauty too.
The poem is in praise of God who crated this world with unimaginable variety. Hopkins uses his own phrases, words, rhythm and ideas to express his awe and wonder at the greatness of the Creator.
He begins the poem with a clear and straight forward statement.

             Glory be to God for dappled things-

Then he goes on to list and describe some of the things in his own way. He believed that, just like the landscapes which refer to the beauty of nature out in the open, everything had its own inner beauty also. He referred to this as the inscape, or the inner world of things. He also believed that through several methods which he referred to as instress, the poet brings out the inscape in everything they write about. So though the poet is writing eulogies and eulogies on God, this is done through bringing to light the real beauty in things.
Hopkins uses some traditional methods like figures of speech and comparisons and well chosen words and sound to show things in a clear light. He also uses rhythm, stress and alliteration to make his lines beautiful. He also invents new words when he finds the old ones inadequate.
For example, he compares the sky which has more than one colour to a cow which has more than one colour. The patterns on the body of a cow are very similar to cloud formations. Hopkins uses the word 'brinded' to refer to the way the cow is coloured. This is a word he coined for the purpose of shedding  new light on the pattern of colours on a cow and in the sky. The new and strange words make the readers look more deeply into the objects of comparison. We do so to get a better meaning of the word but we are actually getting a clearer idea of the objects of comparison.
Hopkins also juxtaposes things of different nature. Just after he describes the sky he talks about the patterns of the body of trouts. After referring to God's greatness as seen in two basic elements, air and water, Hopkins refers to fire indirectly when he says,

 fresh fire-coal chestnut-falls...

In the next line he makes a direct remark about the fourth element, the earth when he says,
Landscape plotted and pierced - fold, fallow and plough;
We can also see that the poet breaks the conventions of language use to keep us alert about his utterances. Since words and phrases easily become cliches, the novelty in expression and the shocking way in which the poet has dared to move away from the conventional usage, help the poet hold our attention while he shares his thoughts with us.
Hopkins uses sprung rhythm as his meter. In this meter the first syllables are stressed and it gives each line its energy and power when we read it out loud. Another device used by the poet is the use of special sounds like sibilance and alliteration as in lines like,

                   Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings

which shows alliteration and

                   with swift, slow, sweet, sour, adazzle, dim'

which shows sibilance

After showing us a list of things which are examples of pied beauty, the poet goes back to his original intention of praising the glory of God who created all this. He admits that he doesn't know how God makes all things beautiful. He states that God's own beauty remains eternal and unchanged.
Thus the poem raised from mere eulogy or a simple prayer to the level of a work of art since the poet has managed to shed new light on our experiences of life. The thought content remains simple but the way the poet describes the world around makes us see the world as we have never seen it before.