Pied Beauty

by Gerard Manley Hopkins·1918·Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

gerard-manley-hopkins/ #sonnet #nature #faith #1910s

First published in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918), ed. Robert Bridges.

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.

cd ~