Praise for Dappled Things
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 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.
, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)
What we often call flaws (the mottled, the freckled, the uneven) Hopkins names as sacred. The brinded cow, the stippled trout, the sky of couple-colour: these are not deviations from some ideal form but the very substance of beauty. “Counter, original, spare, strange.” The words resist smoothness, each one set slightly apart.
We live in a moment when generation has become frictionless. Images, text, music emerge in seconds, polished and plausible. And yet Hopkins reminds us that noticing is not the same as producing. He attends to this sky, these finches’ wings, that chestnut still warm from fire. His attention is physical, rooted in actual encounter. No amount of generation creates the experience of seeing rose-moles stipple a trout’s belly, of being arrested by a specific, unrepeatable thing.
Perhaps what becomes precious is the willingness to be present to the particular. Hopkins’ poem ends in paradox: unchanging beauty praised through endlessly changing things. The holy appears in the mottled and uneven, in what we might otherwise have smoothed away.
Something similar may be true of human making. We don’t create despite our fingerprints, our irregularities, our particular way of seeing. We create through them. The dappled thing is beautiful not because it approximates some universal, but because it does not. It is itself, fickle and freckled, and that is enough.