Talking about Pied Beauty, I'd love to analyze it here -- it is unarguably one of the most successful poems in the language, yet it is full of delicious metrical anomalies.

As for the ending, I can see that Hopkins probably intended "Him" to take the stress, but I prefer to "misread" it.




[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited October 02, 2001).]

Well, I guess you could say that a line that substitutes
two anapests for three iambs is a sort of tetrameter,
but Frost makes such lines fit very easily into his
blank verse. The passage I quoted is blank verse, and
there is only one of those four-beat lines. Look at
the last 40 lines or so of "A Servant to Servants"
where there must be a dozen of them.
Yes, Caleb, you're perfectly free to misread Hopkins
or anyone else. You can even turn the book upside
down and misread that way.