c. 1880 / England

Who Knows Why?

Tags:: Gerard Manley Hopkins,; glory to God,; poetry

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.

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Published In

Religion

About the Author

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty.” John Henry Newman received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church in 1866, after the young man had read the Cardinal’s account of his own conversion. Entering into the Jesuit novitiate two years later, Hopkins burned his youthful verse. His poetic silence lasted seven years, until, prompted by the drowning of five Franciscan nuns, he composed “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”

Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.