Today I’d like to meditate with you all a bit on a poem. It’s called “Pied Beauty” and was written by Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877. I’ve enjoyed this poem for a while, and I’m always eager to share it – though at the same time I always want to warn people ahead of time that Hopkins’ poems are a bit loose in terms of making sense. That is, however, part of the point, especially in this poem. But read it through a few times with me, and try to at least get the gist of what Hopkins is saying.

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.

I think this is a magnificent poem. It’s about the varied nature of beauty – or perhaps how beauty is so often found in variation. This pied or varied nature of beauty might be just skin deep, but it might also suggest a much deeper and unified meaning. The scales on a fish need not be a single color in order for them to be beautiful; indeed, it is in their varied that their beauty is found. You can see this by looking at Japanese koi, which sometimes have as many colors as a calico cat.

This beauty-in-variation is witnessed to in the various subject matters that Hopkins chooses for his poem, but also in the poet’s choice of punctuation: the semi-colon. Now, most of us shy away from using semi-colons, because they’re kind of a mystery to use. Are they a colon? Are they a period? Are they a comma? Yes, all of the above – but they’re also their own thing.

Semi-colons join two full sentences that bear a certain amount of affinity with one another. Think of them like sibling sentences; they help explain one another as they remain distinct from each other. Semi-colons can be rather powerful, suggesting a sort of mysterious, inner connection that needs to be felt and pondered much more than it can be realized with the conscious mind.

In “Pied Beauty”, Hopkins doesn’t use semi-colons to connect full sentences, but he might as well be. Each line is a full image that Hopkins asks us to picture and ponder, consider and contemplate. But, importantly, he doesn’t want us to lose those images as we continue through the poem. He wants us to overlay the image of a brinded cow with rose-moles on trout, then to place above those two images those of chestnut-falls and finches’ wings. Take all these images in. Let your heart and mind be heavy with them. Don’t toss out and move on but keep – keep it all in your arms as you move through the poem, as you move through the world as Hopkins shows us.

The semi-colon, for Hopkins and for English grammar, distinguishes as much as it sets apart, joins as much as it separates, so that each example of a “pied thing” is identified with each other thing. And in this way, the semi-colon represents a relationship very much like those relationships in the Trinity. The Son is not the Father, nor is the Father the Son, but the Son is in the Father and the Father is in the Son. There’s a mystery – indeed the deepest mystery of the Christian faith!

We do not, however, leave mysteries to be confusing and move on. We move within them. Indeed, as Christians, we’re asked to move within the relationships of the Trinity in constant rotation. I don’t remember where I read it, but someone once said that prayer can be defined as entering into the loving relationship between the Father and the Son that is the Holy Spirit. And, as in any loving relationship, we do not leave behind the one when we contemplate the other: we overlay the Son on top of the Father and the Father on top of the Son, with the Holy Spirit around them and between them, as we pray to the singular Being that we call God. One Being, of course, even as we move between each Person of that Being.

I think that Hopkins may have been considering about this specific aspect of the Trinity in this poem, especially since he attributes all of this varied beauty to God and specifically thanks God for it. Whether he is or not, we can see each aspect of Creation that Hopkins mentions and separates by semi-colons as icons of the Trinity’s interrelatedness. Just as we can see the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, so can we praise God in cows, trout, and the landscape, even in the same breath. And in that single breath is a wisdom too deep for words; it can only be experienced and lived.

Where, though, do we live this wisdom? I think that we live it in the liturgy, with all of its varied parts, most of them (with the obvious exception of the Eucharist) being of equal weight. I think we live this wisdom, also, in knowing our family and friends over the years, when we see them in more and more varied ways and depths. I think we live this wisdom, too, when we reflect on ourselves and the various ‘persons’ we have in us, though while we at the same time we remain singular beings, just like God. And I think we live this wisdom in our prayer, which is not simple or singular but varied, dappled, and pied, just like the beauty that Hopkins hopes for us to see and for which he encourages us to praise God.

The pictures for this post were taken by my wife during our trip to Tsuwano, Japan, a small town north of Hiroshima, back in 2007.