A New Year's Wish

Web Posted: January 5, 2004

At the beginning of a new year and a new semester, we look afresh at our world and each other, noticing the presence of God in all things. Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, Pied Beauty, helps to raise our awareness of that God-presence and lift our spirits toward the beautiful and holy.

Pied Beauty 
Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled 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 all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet. sour; a dazzle, dim:
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him.