A month of poems: Day 15

April 23, 2019

This April is the 24th National Poetry Month, a celebration established and organized by the Academy of American Poets. Throughout the month, there are a number of specific events including Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 18, and the Dear Poet project. Every school day this month, the King Street Chronicle will publish one poem in honor of National Poetry Month.

Pied Beauty
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.