Poetry Friday: Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Here is my all-time favorite GMH poem – it smacks of glorious springtime, and happy abandon in the warming climes of creation. I cannot even touch on how Hopkins play with language amazes me. It’s like words painting pictures – if you stop in the middle, they make no sense but if you just read along it all comes together. I love that the words play and flow like a school of fish in the water. What I love most about Hopkins, besides that, is that he reaches heights of praise, but equally plumbs the depths of despair. There is always a poem of his that is apropos, no matter where life may have you.

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 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.

The poetry round-up this week is hosted at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

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