"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

Source of the text - Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, now first published, Edited with notes by Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate.  London: Humphrey Milford, 1918, page 30.

TJB: Beauty mark. In this, the ultimate naming-poem, trochees, spondees, & alliteration are among the dappled things for which we are to praise “him.”