dappled things

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things,
For skies of couple-color 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.


(G.M. Hopkins)


Ahhh Hopkins. i think Christianity could definitely do with more writers like Hopkins - people who combine a poet's sensibility with a faith tested in fire.

What i like about this poem is the way it celebrates 'all things counter, original, spare, strange'. Too often, Christianity is seen as, or worse still, is made to be, the religion of the status quo, and God is reduced to some bearded WASP (white anglo-saxon protestant) male sitting atop a cloud and brandishing a thunderbolt, ready to strike anything that doesn't conform to whatever society currently sees as acceptable behaviour. It's a fine line, of course, between what is socially and morally acceptable, but the trouble with establishment Christianity is that it often fails to even think about that line, or to acknowledge its existence.

But if Christians continue to pretend that the line isn't there, then we should not complain about the dearth of good Christian artists (in the widest sense of the word: writers, musicians, dramatists, dancers), philosophers, scientists - in essence, anyone whose business it is to create new things - because these are precisely the people who are most likely to question the status quo and upset Society.

Of course, there is also the fact that Christianity is at heart a most radical religion, founded on the most radical of stories. God, conceived out of wedlock, born in a manger, raised, first as a refugee, then as a carpenter's boy, hanging out with tax-collectors, prostitutes, lepers (the modern equivalent would be AIDs patients, i think), breaking the letter of the Law to uphold its spirit, arrested and executed as a rabble-raiser and political insurgent. Honestly, i think that most of us, myself included, would cast our lot with the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees if Christ were in our midst today. Nasty, uncomfortable thought.

But perhaps (with reference to the previous post) this is one of the things that poetry should make happen: force us to face the uncomfortable, to be, for a moment at least, honest with ourselves, and more essentially, with God.
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