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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins praises God, Who is uniform and immutable, for His grace in creating a category of things that are variegated and changeable. His little sonnet–it’s exactly 3/4 the length and breadth of a regular sonnet–is written in the tradition of a Psalm. Compare, for instance, “Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving; sing praise upon the harp unto our God: / Who covereth the heaven with clouds, who prepareth rain for the earth, who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains.”

I am the opposite of Hopkins in many respects. (He was devout, depressed, gay, and highly gifted.) But lyric poetry is not for showing us ourselves; it’s a key to someone else’s mind. I cannot share Hopkins theology, but I can thank and praise him for appreciating a category of objects that–whether vast or tiny, whether human-made or natural–share the feature of being “dappled.”

(See also “Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall” and my own “For Gerard Manley Hopkins.”)