Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)
This poem was published in 1918, some forty-one years after Hopkins wrote it in 1877, in the year he became a Jesuit priest. His distinctive and innovative poetry found fame after his death rather than during the English Victorian age in which he lived, when more traditional verse was popular and perhaps more acceptable to the Victorian palate.
POEM: "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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 all trades, 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.
[This poem is in the public domain.]
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