On a Hopkins poem
My parents gave me a book by noted Jesuit intellectual James Martin. My parents have always wanted me to be a priest.
Anyway, on page 73 of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, he quotes a famous 19th-century poem by the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poem is titled “Pied Beauty.” Martin says it is an example of trying “to find God in all things.”
Here it is:
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.
One of my grad-school teachers said Hopkins was actually sexually lascivious, even though he was a priest. I don’t think it matters a lot, if the priest is not breaking the law or molesting under-age people. A priest at my high school was found guilty for molesting a student, so it does happen sometimes in the clergy.
Anyway, it is a beautiful poem.