Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Comment on "Pied Beauty "

The general way of Aesthetic Realism is present in Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty." With Hopkins, the religious way of seeing welcomed precision, detail, perceptive speed, the determination of courageous observing. Aesthetic Realism stands for the utter regard of any object whatsoever—in all its ontological nonconformity—and the deepest respect for existence, as such, as the cause of value, and the Hopkins poem "Pied Beauty" goes along with that purpose.
—Eli Siegel

From The Critical Muse: Imperative Aesthetic Realism Illustrations
© 1974 by Aesthetic Realism Foundation

Pied Beauty

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

The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W.H. Garner and N.H. Mackenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp.69-70.

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