about beauty and a break

I said yesterday’s blessing of hands would be the last posting before Thanksgiving Break — changed my mind looking out at the November dawn today and smiling all over because of this break.  Here’s a Hopkins praise of beauty.   I wonder if anything restores fatigue  so much as a slow-down pace and the presence of beauty.

See you next week.

john sj

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).  Poems.  1918.

13. 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;

        5

    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:

        10

                  Praise him.
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