Dappled Things

Dappled Things March 22, 2013

I am hungry for spring, for the scent of black loamy soil, for the sight of yellow-green tips of hardy bulbs, for the return of determined blue-birds and argumentative red-winged blackbirds.

I long to feel the warmth from sunlight on the smooth bark of poplars and willows, to draw down the tips of budding trees and deduce the patterned bud to be leaf or flower.

I have loved the fierce beauty of this winter’s storms. But I am tired of the grays and browns that remain once the snow is gone. I need the soft sun of spring to draw pigment into my world, to give me the beauty of “dappled things” as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his familiar poem:

 Pied Beauty 
 
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
 
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him. 

It often seems the longer I hunger the sweeter the gift once received. I may shed tears of joy when spring begins to birth.

 

 


Browse Our Archives