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 all trades, 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
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” In this famous line, Hopkins portrays God as an artist who adorns the created world with the inexhaustible splendor of beauty. Whether one looks at the “couple-colour” of the sky with its background of blue dotted with white clouds or the blend of colors at the sunrise and the sunset, the heavens proclaim the glory of God who paints the world with a variety of light and a diversity of the combinations of colors. As an artist, God’s style and signature possess tell-tale signs like the mark of “piedness”.
The brindled cow with its patchwork of brown and white is as mixed or “pied” as the multi- colored sky, and the rainbow trout with its “rose moles all in stipple” again reveals a multiplicity of colors, the image of one dominant color overlaid by a second one that forms patches or dots of different sizes. God the artist uses the same technique of infinite variety as he paints the sky, earth, and sea as in never-ending mixtures. God’s art is as consummate in the small masterpieces of nature as in the majesty of the heaven and earth. The roasted chestnuts glowing in “Fresh firecoal” radiate a spectrum of light in all the degrees of brightness from the intense to the dim, and the finches’ wings are touched with the golden streaks that brighten the world with radiance.
The earth too in the changing clothing of the four seasons and the combination of hills and valleys and in the variations of its contours and landscapes adorns the world with a checkered, patchwork-quilt design: “Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plow.” Farmland, woods, prairies, pastures, and rivers—all these gradations of colors and contrasting backgrounds creating a cornucopia of delights for the eye. Man too is as marvelous in his composition as the other works of art God creates as the Father of beauty. “And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim” refers not only to the art of fishing but also to all the talents and gifts God in His boundless generosity bestows upon all of human nature. Farming and cooking and medicine and music and engineering manifest the same love of variety and individuality in human nature that God relishes in the riot of color and designs that fill heaven and earth without limit. As Hopkins writes in his poem “Spring,” “What is all this juice and all this joy?” How does one explain this abundant, infinite supply of beauty without end that infuses all things great and small in creation and evokes a sense of the miraculous nature of beauty?
Hopkins’ poem begins in wonder (“Glory be to God for dappled things”) and ends in knowledge (“He fathers -forth whose beauty is past change”). As he beholds the universality of beauty, marvels at its myriad of forms, and contemplates the simplicity and mystery of visible things, this wonder leads to truth: “Praise him.” All effects resemble their causes. The experience of the joy of the beautiful, “the attractive aspect of the good” to use St. Thomas’s term, moves the mind to seek the origin of beauty, the cause behind the effect, the form that shapes the matter. “Praise him,” Hopkins writes because God is Beauty just as He is Truth and Goodness. Beauty does not merely happen by accident just as a work of art does not exist by chance.
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God “fathers-forth,” that is, generates life, provides for His children, blesses them liberally with gifts, and desires their happiness and joy. Thus God creates a pied world with limitless sources of pleasure, “All things counter, original, spare, strange”—what Hopkins called the haeceitas (“thisness”) or “inscape” of things, the radical otherness that makes each thing individual and new, a unique work of art. All the harmonious movements of creation that produce music or rhythm (“With swift, slow”); all the delicious tastes that give relish to food (“sweet, sour”), and all the degrees of light and dark (“adazzle, dim”) that define the beautiful as “that which being seen pleases” and produce the pleasure of contrast and complementarity come from the fatherly, providential love of God who never leaves his children without the light and glory joy of beauty as a sign of His nearness and presence.
Like the Psalmist who utters “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork” and like St. Paul who teaches that “the invisible things of God are known by the things which are visible” and like St. Thomas Aquinas who identified God as the Beautiful in addition to the True and the Good, Hopkins beholds the miracle of pied beauty as the touch of God the artist—the artist who inspired Hopkins to say of the simple bluebell, “I know the beauty of the Lord by it.”
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
