Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I’ve loved this poem ever since I was nineteen, when my mom, who is a children’s writer, and a poet, shared it with me.

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 plow;

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.