The
piedness of his writings is revealed most lucidly at the interstices of various disciplines, art forms, senses, and environments.
Polixenes pursues the matter: "Wherefore, gentle maiden,/Do you neglect them?" Perdita responds, "For I have heard it said,/There is an art, which in their
piedness shares/With great creating Nature."
Hopkins, in the summer before his ordination in 1877, composed many of his nature sonnets, reflections in their way on the structure to be found by contemplating nature's piedness, variation, and hidden potential--the order to be gleaned from such phenomena as "wilder, wilful-wavier /Meal-drift" (clouds) and "shining from shook foil" (lightning) ("Hurrahing in Harvest," no.
Both emphasize, through analogies that accrue levels of complexity, the particular "piedness"--reflected in figures, epithets, and conceits--held together by a moment of instressing.
The unfastening of self in "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "Carrion Comfort," the apocalyptic night and coldness in "God's Grandeur," the dis-membering of nature and historical dis-remembering in "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," the "enormous dark" that seemingly climaxes everything in "Heraclitean Fire," and the demise of
piedness registered in countless other poems are all familiar indicators or what Gillian Beer sees as an "entropic movement...