British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford, England (1844). He loved poetry as a kid, but when he was in college in 1866, he gave up poetry for Lent. That summer, he converted to Catholicism. Less than a week later, he burned all of his own poems and didn't write again for seven years. He went into a kind of exile, joined the Jesuits, and traveled to rural Wales to be ordained as a priest. Those months in Wales would be one of the happiest periods of his life. It was while he was there, in 1877, preparing for his ordination, that he realized he could continue to write poetry as long as he was using his poetry to praise God. And so, in that single year of 1877, Hopkins wrote most of the poems for which he is remembered today, poems like "God's Grandeur" (1877), "Pied Beauty" (1877), and "The Starlight Night," (1877). He wrote in his diary at the time, "This world is ... a book [God] has written ... a poem of beauty."
But after his ordination, the Jesuits sent him to teach the poor children of industrial cities in Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Hopkins had looked forward to a life of hard work and sacrifice, but he had no idea how much he would hate living in these polluted, ugly cities. He wrote less and less, and finally, at the age of 44, he died from typhoid, which he'd caught from the polluted water in Dublin. He had published very few of his poems in his lifetime, and he might have been forgotten, except that he had kept up a lifelong correspondence with a friend from college: the poet Robert Bridges.
Hopkins had sent Bridges many of his poems, and after Hopkins's death, Bridges began to publish Hopkins's poetry
Pied Beauty
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; 5
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: 10
Praise him.
pied: of different colors
dappled: made up of cloudy, rounded patches of different shades of the same color
couple-colored: two-colored
brinded: having dark streaks or flecks
rose-moles: rose-colored spots
stipple: a painting technique which uses the ends of the brush bristles to make dots
fresh fire-coal chestnut falls: the brightness of new chestnuts when they fall from the trees, looking as though they are lit with fire from within
fold: pasture land, or a paddock or corral where animals are penned up
fallow: land left to rest every seven years, covered with grass and wildflowers
plow: plowed cropland, with crops of wheat or oats
counter: opposite, as in counterclockwise
fickle: erratically changeable
adazzle: shining brilliantly
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