Headmaster Musings • Aug 15, 2025

Pied Beauty

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

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We spend so much time, as Catholics, seeking the eternal things, those things that do not change and can be relied upon. We lament this unreliable world filled with changes and decay, and we are right to seek such higher things. But sometimes it is good to remember that change itself, all change, and all changing things were created by our good God in and to His boundless joy. And He saw that they were good!

Our children will grow so much this year at Chesterton Academy of the Incarnation. I do not know how many times I have commented, regarding my own children, that “they grow so fast!” It is often with a sort of wistfulness. We remember when we first held them in our arms, when they took their first steps, when we heard that beautiful baby babble become a real voice with ideas and unique desires behind it. At every stage we are both sad and joyful. Something has been lost as they grow up; childhood is not en evil to be eliminated. But it is good and proper that children desire to leave that good state and enter a new one, for which they were made. They are, like all of us, dappled things.

Part of the brilliance of Hopkins in this poem is stolen from many older Christian thinkers, but he expresses it so well. These changes in our lives and selves are so beautiful; they are the story God is telling to each of us, the story that is who we really are. Aslan tells Lucy just such a thing in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The girl reads the most beautiful story she has ever read and then immediately, by magic, forgets most of it. She asks Aslan, the Christ figure of that world, if he will tell her the story again and he says, “Indeed, yes. I will tell it to you for years and years.” It is, of course, the story of her own life, seeming so troublesome and mundane in the moment, but in its entirety so beautiful, exciting, and perfect just for her.

But story requires change and change requires loss, as each scene replaces the last. We love each detail and each moment of our children’s stories so much that we want to hold onto it, but we also know it is still partial, incomplete, not yet perfect. The part can never be more beautiful or perfect than the whole. Only the whole story of a life is ever perfect, precisely as Providence would have it. We never see this whole story in this life, even when it is our own story. As for our children, although we know them better than anyone, even we see only a little fragment of their entire story. But what a gift to get to see and share our lives with these dappled things and delight at the same time in their changes and the memory of how they once were. Yet always with that gentle melancholy that yearns for that eternal joyful moment in which nothing is lost.

Only God has ever known any of us fully: who we are, who we were, who we will be all together as a single unity outside of time in the mind of God. We have only ever been the fullness of ourselves in the mind of God. He is changeless and in Him nothing is lost. Our Father gathers up all lost things, like a parent combing over the hotel room before checking out, and never misses one thing that is good. He gathers them all up into Himself for us to have again, or in a very real sense to have for the first time, in eternity, unchanging, with Him. Praise Him.