Analyze "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Explore the central theme and the poet's stance toward God.

"Pied Beauty" is a short poem, only two stanzas long. In its use of language, it displays several features characteristic of Hopkins's work: the newly-coined terms compounded with hyphens ("rose-moles," "fresh-firecoal," "chestnut-falls") and the unique typography ("áll trádes"). Hopkins's spontaneous use of these coinages creates a sense that he, as a poet, is overwhelmed by the "dappled things" which are the subject of the poem: their "glory" is God's creation, and pre-existing language is insufficient to describe it.
The core theme of the poem, as with many of Hopkins's poems, is God's creation and its beauty. Hopkins was fascinated with nature and how it reflected the hand of God on earth. The final line of this poem addresses the reader directly, an exhortation: "Praise him." This line seems to summarize the point the poet has been making in the preceding lines, as he enumerates all the many things "counter, original, spare, strange" which God has created. Hopkins deliberately chooses to praise God for "dappled" things to emphasize the fact that there is "pied beauty" in everything—beauty does not require regularity or convention. Instead, there is beauty to be found in the "couple-colour" of skies and in things that are "fickle, freckled." Hopkins's stance towards God is that we should see all parts of nature as evidence of God's handiwork, because he is the creator of everything and should be praised for the great originality of his creation.