Pied Beauty

I fell in love with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins in University. This is one that I memorized at the time. I love it because it's not a striving for perfection. It's not a whiny defeatists resignation to imperfection either....wallowing in self-pity. Instead it's a call to praise God for what he is birthing in us and around us even when what we see is imperfect or not what we expected...or even seems ugly to us at the time. It is a call to keep our eyes on the One who *is* perfect. There is a bigger picture.


Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).

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.