SOURCE: "Seeing Pied Beauty: A Key to Theme and Structure," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 64-6.

In the following essay, Lowenstein asserts that the features that give "Pied Beauty" its distinctive quality are characteristic of Impressionist art.

As Francis Fike suggests [in VP, 1970], there is room for further exploration of Hopkins' relation to the art of painting. Hopkins' belief that poetry and painting are closely allied, that "inscape" or patterning is, to use Fike's word, "crucial" to both, sanctions such endeavors; but aside from Hopkins' complaint to Bridges about Millais' lack of "feeling for beauty in abstract design," there is little in the comments about painting that illuminates the distinctive quality of a poem like "Pied Beauty."

Unlike the popular paintings of its day, the visual art in "Pied Beauty" is neither anecdotal nor literary. In itself, it is free of ideas or sentiment, and is...