Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

Starting in on new novel by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Washington Post review click here. This is going to be a good one--already appreciating the novel and the poetry it has provoked me to revisit. Like this one:



Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things,
For 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,
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