Pied Beauty

The photo's title is also the title of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, my all-time favorite poet.

 

Written in 1877 but not published until 1918, the poem paradoxically connects at the end the variety of creation with the immutability of its Creator.

 

The structure of the poem is a "curtal sonnet", which is sort of a truncated sonnet and a form Hopkins himself invented.

 

 

Pied Beauty

 

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.

Done