Dappled Glory: Gerard Manley Hopkins

The first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty” is an incredibly well-known one: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” The reader necessarily wonders: what is it about dappled things that are especially worthy of praise? Hopkins spends the rest of the stanza describing these pied or dappled things: “skies of couple-color 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” (lines 2-5), including so many images that would not normally be placed together. The sky, cows, trout, chestnuts, birds’ wings, farmed landscapes: these images are some animal, some vegetable, and some mineral. I find the image of the “landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough” (line 5) to be perhaps most interesting, since it describes not natural outdoor beauty but something man-made. A fallow field could often be taken to represent man’s corruption of God’s created beauty, since man had to take his rusty tools to the land and dig it up in order to produce his crops. Yet Hopkins counts its dappled beauty among that of shining trout and the beautiful fluttering wings of finches.

In short, Hopkins praises God for “Whatever is fickle, freckled,” and imperfect (line 8). He may be insinuating that the very dapples that render these objects apparently imperfect are, in Hopkins’ mind, what makes them even more beautiful. In wisdom, God chose to give some things freckles and spots, and leave some things without. Though that seems a simple, even an insignificant, choice, Hopkins wishes his readership to know that he sees the beauty in this imperfection.

However, even if “dappled” is not intended to represent imperfection, I see as the point of Hopkins’ choosing that particular trait to communicate to his reader that to focus on all of God’s beauty would be an insurmountably large task. Instead, even only focusing on “things counter, original, spare, strange,” and dappled (line 7), Hopkins still finds so much there that he can scarcely express his gratitude and amazement at it all. He must narrow down creation to even attempt to describe or appropriately glorify it; still there is so much beauty that even as masterful an artist as Hopkins cannot remotely express it. God “whose beauty is past change” can still change so much in the world, and he does so for the sheer glory of it (line 10). Ultimately, Hopkins’ reaction to all the “dappled things” in the world, from clouded skies to fallow fields, is to implore his reader: “Praise him” who made those things, and who continues to produce in all ways elements of his glory (line 12).