Hopkins opens with the kind of line you might hear in church, "Glory be to God", and then swerves. He doesn't give thanks for mountains or sunsets or anything obviously grand. He gives thanks for "dappled things": streaky cows, spotted trout, a patchwork of fields. The title word "pied" means patched with two or more colours, like a magpie, and the whole poem celebrates things that refuse to be one plain shade. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, and the poem is plainly a prayer. What keeps it fresh is how closely he looks before he praises.
The first six lines travel from sky to water to tree to bird to farmland, and the comparisons keep dragging heaven down to earth. A sky "of couple-colour" is likened to a "brinded cow", so clouds and blue become a streaked hide. The trout's "rose-moles all in stipple" makes you see tiny pink dots, as if painted with the tip of a brush. "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls" packs three ideas into a chain of hyphens, and the glowing-coal comparison suggests the warm, glossy brown of newly fallen chestnuts. Then the view widens to a "Landscape plotted and pieced", fields seen like a quilt, and finally to people. The stresses Hopkins marks in "áll trádes" tell the reader to hammer on those words, so that human work, with its "gear and tackle and trim", is counted as part of the pattern rather than a spoiler of it.
Those marks point to his sprung rhythm, which counts stressed beats rather than syllables. Read aloud, the lines bounce and lurch, with heavy beats bunched together and the unstressed syllables squeezed in between. The sound does the work of the sense: the f of "Fresh-firecoal" and "finches' wings" crackles, and "fickle, freckled" practically flickers.
In the second stanza, concrete pictures give way to adjectives with hardly a verb among them: "counter, original, spare, strange". "Counter" here means contrary, the opposite of what you'd expect, and the list gathers up anything that doesn't fit a pattern. Then comes the poem's most human moment, the parenthesis "(who knows how?)". Hopkins stops mid-list to admit he can't explain why the world is so speckled. The pairs that follow, "swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim", sit side by side, balanced by semicolons. "Adazzle" is his own coinage, and it makes brightness sound like a state of being rather than a quality.
The turn is the paradox in "He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change". The world is fickle and freckled, yet its source is changeless. The compound verb "fathers-forth" casts creation as parenthood, with all the variety of the world as one enormous family. The poem implies that the changeable things are not a flaw in the design but the evidence of the Maker's energy.
The form carries the argument too. Hopkins called this shape a curtal sonnet, a sonnet cut short: a six-line stanza followed by four and a half lines. The rhyme runs *abcabc dbcdc*, and the pattern pays off at the very end. "Praise him" is a half line, almost a breath, and "him" rhymes with "swim", "trim" and "dim", all the way back to the first stanza. The command is therefore woven into the poem's own sounds. A poem about irregular, original, spare things is itself an irregular and spare sonnet.
Its lasting significance lies in what it asks of the reader: to treat spots, streaks and patches as gifts rather than blemishes. It makes that argument through language that feels newly minted, with compound words, coinages and stresses you can feel in your mouth. In just over ten lines, it turns a farmyard, a river and a ploughed field into a hymn.