Dappled things

 

When I was twelve years old, my mother paid one dollar for a box that held all the Books of Knowledge, an encyclopedia for young people.  I learned to love poetry from those musty old 1939 Books of Knowledge, and many other wonderful things. 

While walking in the pasture this morning, I looked at all the lighted spots the sun was putting on the ground as it rose behind the tree branches and dry leaves, and the words that came to my mind whispered "dappled things".  Words from a poem I absolutely loved back in 1956, although I wasn't sure what all the words in the poem meant.  I saw grassy places in the melting snow as more dappled things.  Even my black-and-white dog is dappled.  

At this very minute I am looking down at the back of my hands, which are also dappled with what my parents called liver spots.  When I accidentally look at myself in the bathroom mirror, those white hairs on my head among the brown ones make it a dappled thing.   

Even now I'm not quite sure I know what all the words and lines of the poem mean, but I have loved them since I first read them.

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things –

By Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

   For skies of couple-colour as a brindled 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.

“Pied” means having two or more colours, and it is this quality of variety that the speaker most admires about God's work.

They are all pied, or contain two or more colors. Gerard Manly Hopkins' shortened sonnet, 'Pied Beauty' (1918) gives praise to God for these peculiar, spotted, marked, and multicolored things.

A brindled cow is a cow with dark flecks or streaks on a gray or tawny background. The word "brindled" comes from the word "brined" and was first used in 1620