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
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Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
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13. Pied Beauty
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| GLORY be to God for dappled things— |
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| For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; |
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| For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; |
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| Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; |
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| Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; |
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| And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. |
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| All things counter, original, spare, strange; |
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| Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) |
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| With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; |
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| He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: |
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| Praise him. |
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