Gerard Manley Hopkins: 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.

~~~

Public Domain

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame placed him among leading Victorian poets. His prosody – notably his concept of sprung rhythm – established him as an innovator, as did his praise of God through vivid use of imagery and nature. Only after his death did a few of Hopkins’s poems appear in anthologies where they were recognized for their innovative use of imagery and rhythm. By 1930 Hopkins’s work was seen as one of the most original literary advances of his century.