An Audio Guide to Poetry Recitation - 10. "Pied Beauty"

An Audio Guide to Poetry Recitation - 10. "Pied Beauty"


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Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of the most experimental, playful and difficult poets ever to write in English. Although hi spoem makes profound sense, what attracts you first is the force of their sound.  Here again is Kay Ryan.

Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
[Read by Kay Ryan]

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.

[Voice of Kay Ryan] He has these crazy rhymes. He is just an insane rhymer and I just get such a kick out of the stuff he puts in here. I love "fickle freckled" all those beautiful things that  are stuck together. And look at "dapple, stipple, fallow, fickle, freckled", [laughter], a dazzle. [laughter] I mean that is just so funny to me. Partly he is just, he is just, so filled with ecstasy, he is ecstactic that he is laughing and I think his poem is just laughing. Sometimes there is ecstatic with grief, but that is a kind of laughter too. There is a laughter of grief.