{"id":13892,"date":"2014-06-11T16:51:19","date_gmt":"2014-06-11T20:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13892"},"modified":"2014-06-11T16:51:19","modified_gmt":"2014-06-11T20:51:19","slug":"pied-beauty-illustrated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13892","title":{"rendered":"Pied Beauty, illustrated"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glory be to God for dappled things<\/em>
\n\"Screen<\/a>
\n For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;<\/em>
\n\"Screen<\/a> \"Screen<\/a>
\nFor rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim<\/em>;
\n\"Screen<\/a>
\nFresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches\u2019 wings;<\/em>
\n\"Screen<\/a>\"Screen<\/a>\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Landscape plotted and pieced \u2013 fold, fallow, and plough;<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>\"Screen<\/a>
\nAnd \u00e1ll tr\u00e1des, their gear and tackle and trim.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a>\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

All things counter, original, spare, strange;<\/em>
\n Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)<\/em>
\n With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;<\/em>
\n He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:<\/em>
\n Praise him.<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

(See also “Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins\u2019 Spring and Fall”<\/a> and my own “For Gerard Manley Hopkins<\/a>.”)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019 wings; Landscape plotted and pieced \u2013 fold, fallow, and plough; And \u00e1ll tr\u00e1des, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-on-poems","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13892"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13940,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13892\/revisions\/13940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}