Ordained Servant Online

Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

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.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985). Ordained Servant Online, November, 2011.