Sharing the Wealth of Beauty

 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 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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins had a personal, appreciative, and sometimes confrontational relationship with God. This poem reflects joy in natural beauty, and his gratitude to God.  The point of the poem is that God, whose character of love is undivided and unchanging, has created a world full of change and difference. This is something Hopkins celebrates. 

He is also an experimenter with language, so I’ll walk through this and then I ask you to read it again aloud. For me, that causes a resonance that no amount of silent reading can achieve. 

Perhaps our most accessible reference for pied is the Pied Piper, so-called because of his multi-colored clothing. Dappled brings horses with shades of gray to mind. Brinded is shorthand for brindled, the shades of color seen in cows and dogs. Those who fish can attest to the rose-moles (pink spots) that stipple, or dot, trout. When chestnuts fall and their spiky green casing breaks, the inner glossy brown nut reminds Hopkins of fire coals. He sees the variation of color on finches. And the farmland around has plots of land resembling the pieces of a quilt, including patches where sheep are enclosed, fields lying fallow, and fields recently plowed. And then he thinks of the humans and all the ways they work (their trades) and the equipment they use in each trade.

Counter has in it the idea of opposition, original contains the idea of uniqueness. Spare includes opposing ideas of extra and minimal. So even in this word, Hopkins incorporates difference. He obviously likes the sound of fickle and freckled side by side. Fickle brings in the idea of unwelcome change. Freckled brings in again the ideas of pied and dappled and brinded—a single surface with variations. Hopkins broadens the idea of  freckled to include speed, taste, and light. 

The creation exists in beauty, for which we praise God. Change and variation, even contrast and opposition, are all the product of God’s creativity. And in this poem, they are also partly the result of human activity in nature. 

Time and space fail me to talk about the beauty of the sounds in this poem—the alliteration of glory-God, couple-color-cow, fresh-fire-falls-finches-fold-fallow, plotted-pieced-plough; the assonance (vowel sounds) of couple-colour, for-rose-moles, fresh-chestnut; and the different-similar sounds of who knows how. As a sometime poet myself, I know this takes effort to achieve, and I appreciate the music. (I omit explanation of where the poem speeds up and slows down by means of its sounds. Just let it guide you as you read it.)

I want to share this poem because it praises God for how things are different from each other, and this congregation intends to welcome and affirm people who are not all alike. We know that more voices makes possible more variation in perspective, and that this is something to celebrate.

Now read the poem aloud just for the joy of it.

 If you want to know more about Hopkins, here is the Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins