Pied Beauty

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 àll tràdes, 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.

A short sonnet in praise of the spotted, the freckled and the patched: "All things counter, original, spare, strange." A naturalist's prayer.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems, ed. Robert Bridges (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918). Written 1877. Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US.

Public domain in the United States.