“Pied Beauty”

“Pied Beauty”

 

Manley Hopkins portrait
Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.  (Wikimedia Commons public domain)

 

I’ve loved this poem, by the English convert to Catholicism and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), since I first encountered it as a teenager in a high school English class:

 

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.

 

 


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