PIED BEAUTY

Today is sunny and breezy, actually cold, but beautiful after a few days of grayness. I read this poem as I looked out our den window and watched the sun and wind play with the fallen leaves:

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnur-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plow;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecked (who know how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He Fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
PRAISE HIM. (italics mine)

--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)