Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Glory be to God for dapples 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 all trades, their gear and tackle 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."
(Hopkins, pg 775-776, Pied Beauty

At first read, this is a simple little poem. At close inspection, it is a small masterpiece. I love the repetition in describing just how different things are in life. Hopkins portrays different colors, shapes, sizes, breeds, purposes... all in 11 lines. He makes the reader look at all the differences, consider the similarities, and then ponder how they came to be. I think by putting the question, "Who knows how?" in parentheses made this poem worth talking about. The question can be rhetorical. It can be to make the point that the reader will automatically be drawn to the answer Hopkins desires, whether believer or not. It could be just for the sake of giving it attention. Either way, it succeeded with this reader. He draws an excellent picture of nature and God's hand in it. I like that he divided the lines in the ninth line. My attention was forced to focus on the antonyms. I focused on what I was reading and realized the importance again of differences and originality. In nature, every individual thing encountered has its own mark as said in line seven. I am glad that he was included in the class for this poem, but I do not find him an equal to the others. He in my opinion is quaint. He is certainly no match in argument with Blake.