“Glory be to God.” Then how, we may ask, does he do it? How does he temper the cold wind of the English language to the sensitivity of us poor shorn lambs? Well, immediately on the heels of the all too banal ejaculation, “Glory be to God!” he hastens to add not “for all things” but “for dappled things”. Graciously he leaves all things to look after themselves. Instead he concentrates on what he interestingly calls “dappled things”.
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” “What are dappled things?” we ask, opening our eyes and pricking up our ears. That is the very question the poet evokes in our minds, awakening us in much the same way as Haydn awakens his audience in the course of his “Surprise Symphony”.
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” Thus he lulls us to sleep with his opening cry, “Glory be to God!” After all, it is what we expect of a priest, a minister of God, one whose profession it is to pray and give glory to God. So we nod our heads even before he gets to his sermon. But then he wakes us up with the startling, unexpected object, “for dappled things”. He wakes us up with things that are not simply of one color or one shade of color or merely black and white, but, as he goes on to say, with “skies of couple-color, as a brinded cow.”
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” Then, once again and inevitably, we ask, “What is a brinded cow?” Well she is a cow who isn’t just brown or white but both brown and white, or brown with white streaks. And still he pursues us with “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim”. He is looking in his imagination upon trout swimming in the clear water of a stream, and noting their round marks or moles colored like roses. And he likes the “stipple” of the rose-moles as an echo of “dapple”.
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” Nor is that all. The poet goes on and on, never wearying of adding example upon example of what he means by “dappled things”. It is perhaps only for variety’s sake, till he tires even the most modern of his readers. “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls,” he says, pointing to the “conkers” that have fallen to the ground from horse chestnut trees and burst open, revealing the “gold-vermilion” of their newly exposed nuts. “Finches’ wings”, he says, recalling the parti-colored wings of the chaffinch, the bullfinch, the goldfinch, and the greenfinch, while delighting in the f-alliteration of “finches” carried on from “fresh”, “firecoal” and “falls”. Finally, even Hopkins tires, if only for fear of having tired his readers. And so he throws in “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim” for good measure.
“All things.” Still, this is only the first part of this short or “curtal” sonnet. The poet now proceeds in the second part to take up “all things” which he has seemed to reject. Or rather, he adds to them, by way of epithetal precision. “All things,” he says, now adding epithet to epithet, as before he has added substantive to substantive, “counter, original, spare, strange”. In a word, he says, odd, eccentric, unique (like himself).
“All things.” Then untiringly he proceeds from epithets to phrases and clauses, “Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” There is no end to the examples he has up his sleeve for the unending entertainment of his readers, so long as they are willing to listen to him. There is no end to his witty versatility, his readiness with instances of “dappled things”, till his readers almost in spite of themselves can’t help stopping their ears and crying, “Enough! Enough!”
“Praise him.” Then it is that Hopkins cuts short this “curtal sonnet” of only ten and a half lines (instead of the customary fourteen) with what corresponds to the other Ignatian motto of LDS, “Laus Deo Semper”, that is, “Praise be to God forever”. His opening line has merely stated “Glory be to God”, or the Ignatian AMDG, with the specification “for dappled things”. But then he feels obliged to explain these “dappled things” with what are called (by a certain Father Rodriguez) “sundry examples”. And they take up the next five lines of what would otherwise have been the octet of a 14-line sonnet. Then again in the abbreviated sestet, after adding further examples in which he turns from nouns to adjectives, as objects, he comes in his conclusion to the main verb, “He fathers forth whose beauty is past change.”
“Praise him.” Here for the poet God isn’t only “God”, the supreme being above all things past, present and to come. He is also – as Jesus insists from the beginning of his public ministry, notably in his Sermon on the Mount – above all “Father” in relation to his Son. This isn’t only what Jesus repeats again and again in his sermons, culminating in his final discourse to the disciples at the Last Supper. It is also what the Father himself reveals in his two words uttered both at the baptism in the river Jordan and at the transfiguration on the holy mountain. Only, the poet isn’t content with the noun “Father”, but he must needs change it into a verb, “He fathers forth”.
“Praise him.” And then he must needs add the paradoxical phrase, if only to recall the flagging attention of his modern reader, “whose beauty is past change”. Yes, at the source of all this change, all this “stipple”, all this variety of “mottled” and “dappled things”, there is One, God the Father, “whose beauty is past change”. The things are many in unending, unlimited, interminable plurality, but he is One in triune singularity. It is just as Einstein hypothesized, all lines, however parallel they may seem to be, meet in infinity.
Finally, faced with this supreme paradox at the heart of all being, in the very being and name of God as YHWH, or “I am”, the poet declares, as if limiting himself to the L of “Laus”, “Praise him!”
“Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise”
“The stooks rise.” Here the first question that obviously arises is, “What are stooks?” Shameful it is that such a question should arise, but now a whole generation has grown up without ever having set eyes on a stook field. The last time I myself set eyes on such a field in England was in 1975. We were travelling along a motor-way by coach, and I wanted the driver to stop and let me take a photo of the field. I knew that such fields were already on the way out, and I wouldn’t have many chances left to take a photo of one. But alas! On such a motor-way such a large coach wasn’t allowed to stop. So there was no way of persuading the driver to stop, and no way of taking that photo. And I haven’t had such a chance again. “O tempora, O mores!” – as Cicero once had occasion to complain.
“The stooks rise.” Then what are stooks? And why was it so necessary for me to take a photo of them? I have myself made stooks in a stook field. It was during the war, when schoolboys went from the towns to work on farms. It was such a good experience for me! There I was so much closer to reality than back at school with my books. It was after the fields had been harvested. As the poet says, “Summer ends now.” And as he continues, “Now barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise.”
“Summer ends now.” The harvesters had preceded us, cutting the ripe corn, wheat or barley, with their sickles. Seizing armfuls of the corn and cutting what they held, they would bind them into sheaves and leave the sheaves on the ground. Then it was for us to pick up the sheaves and stack them together, five or six at a time, enabling them to dry. When they had properly dried, they would be carried off the field in carts or lorries to the threshing floor. There they would be subjected to the process of threshing, or beating, so that the dried grain would fall to the ground in piles of edible gold for storing in barns. It was a process as old as the hills, going back to the distant past from ages out of number and memory.
“Summer ends now.” But now, alas, those ages have passed, and all is new and modern. Sheaves and stooks and stookfields have all been forgotten, and harvesting machines have taken their place. Now they complete in an hour what it used to take many labourers to do in many days. Now they leave not “barbarous beauty” in stooks but only mechanized ugliness in cubic bales of straw from which the grain has already been mechanically extracted. “O tempora, O mores!”
“Summer