Pied Beauty

“A poem is a word-snapshot.”

I don’t know if I coined this phrase or if I heard or read it from someone else. But my definition of poetry is: “Poetry is word snapshots.”

A good poet captures a moment or a concept and helps us to see it at a level that our fast-paced, quick glance life doesn’t usually allow.

For me, poetry reading is dashboard gauge to help me monitor the health of my soul. When I am too busy to stop and read poetry I’m too busy.

So all that to introduce one of my little favorite poems that comes up each year in my quote file. It is called Pied Beauty, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (see below).

I’ve also included a link of it being read by Jonathan Roumie, the actor who depicts Jesus in the movie series, The Chosen. He does a masterful job.

I encourage you to find time today to slow down and follow alone with Mr. Roumie and and try to see -really see- the beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins describes in his poem and praise God.

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;
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.