Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

He was an English poet and a Jesuit priest who lived from 1844 to 1889.

He is certainly one of the leading Victorian poets, and his work was highly influential on the likes of T.S.

Eliot and Auden and Dylan Thomas and many, many others of the 20th century.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called Pied Beauty.

It was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, when it was later included as part of a collection that was called

Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is how it goes. Glory beats a god for dappled things,

for skies of couple color as a brinded cow, for rose-moles all instipple upon trout that swim,

fresh fire-cold chestnut 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, freckled, who knows how,

with swift, slow, sweet, sour, a dazzle, dim,

he fathers forth whose beauty is past change. Praise him.

For those who are interested about this, this is actually a called a Kirtle sonnet, which is a form

invented by Hopkins himself. And according to Wikipedia, it was used in three of his poems. But this is an 11-line

sonnet that plays with the form of a Petrarchan sonnet. It's kind of shrunk down, so to speak.

There's an octave, which becomes a sestad in the Hopkins version, and a sestead becomes a quatrain,

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