Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

This is another post in which I share some of my Mini-Con poetry appreciation course. Today, for those of you who want to enjoy poetry more, I give you this piece of advice: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I think Objectivists are particularly prone to this error because we want so much to have clean, wholesome lives, full of rational values that bring us joy. But in our desire to judge and to exclude valueless things from our lives, we sometimes mistake something that isn't perfect for something that is valueless.

In that way, out goes an old tennis partner who is religious. Out goes contact with a mixed family members. And, equally as tragic (at least to me), out goes really quality art that has themes in conflict with our values.

It's important to remember that the idea of God has been inspiring people to write poems and music for thousands of years. The Greeks did it, but it's easy to overlook their Gods because no one believes in them anymore. It can be harder for us to overlook religious art that promotes and supports the religions that are still around. But I hope you will do it, and here's why.

So much of the great art of Western Civilization has religious themes. If you chucked out things dealing with God, you'd have to chuck out Milton, Handel, Bach, John Donne, Michelangelo, Arthurian legends, and Sacred Harp hymn singing. And you'd miss a lot of real value.

It would also be easy to chuck out things that have altruism, destiny, or "negative emotions," but I hope you will take my advice and not throw the baby out with the bathwater. By just letting the religion or destiny be in the poem without obsessing about it, you can find all the other values and the real human experience lying within the poem.

I am posting my reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty" to illustrate this advice. The poem references God and is ostensibly about the wonder of God's creation, but underneath the religion is a joyous appreciation of the real world.

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