Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty is one of the supreme examples of his inventive and experimental use of language to foreground the theme of beauty. As the poem draws contrast between what naked eyes find beautiful against the things deemed ugly by the standard of beauty created by humans, the stylistics devices such as, deviation, parallelism and phonetics devices play crucial role to foreground the beauty in the latter. Mick Short’s (1996) theoretical framework of stylistic analysis was used for the analysis and the interpretation of this poem.Stylistics studies a text by looking at various forms, patterns, and levelsof language structure (i.e. lexical, syntactic, morphological and phonological etc.) to interpret it. To this end, the poem Pied Beauty was thoroughly analyzed for stylistic devices to see how the theme of beauty is foregrounded with help of those devices. Hopkins’ artistry and aesthetic value lives in his experimentation with language by making use of the devices such as grammatical, lexical, phonological graphological, semantic, parallelism and phonetic parallelism, else he would have been a little known poet of Victorian age.
Key words: G.M. Hopkins,Poetry, Pied Beauty,Stylistics, Foregrounding, Deviation, Parallelism, Phonetic Parallelism.
|
