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.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was an English-Irish Jesuit priest and inspired poet. Oxford educated and from a religious Anglican family, he converted to Catholicism as a young man. His poems are remarkable for their inventive use of sound and meter. “Pied Beauty” sees beauty and God in a little-noted aspect of nature, one we often take for granted. It was Hopkins' genius to find God in dappled things.