Dappled Things

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;
      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:
                                Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins... Does anyone really read him any more, I wonder? Beyond those few famous anthology pieces, I mean, and even then beyond the superficial attraction of a few vivid turns of phrase? It's the sort of sugar-high stuff that can turn on the teenage poetry palate, but you quickly tire of verbal chocolate sauce and sprinkles over everything, and then notice the underlying religiosity, like the wooden stick inside the ice lolly: it holds the whole thing together, but is inedible and all but useless to all but a few oddball enthusiasts.  Although... I do wonder where doctors get those horrible "tongue depressors"? [1]

In Britain we've had a run of several weeks of uninterrupted blazing sunshine – three official "heat waves", no less – which is nice for those who like that kind of thing, but – like chocolate sauce and sprinkles – you can find yourself having too much of a good thing quite quickly, especially those of us of a northern European constitution. The unusual strength of the dappled shadows, though, were a visual turn-on for me as I plodded along in the 32° C heat; it was disconcertingly like being transported to southern Europe. So, having decided to post a little gallery of sun-dappled roadside attractions taken with my phone, the Hopkins poem "Pied Beauty" sprang to mind.

Looking for a text of the poem to copy, I landed on the Poetry Foundation website, and ended up reading the detailed but uncredited biography of Hopkins there. I was astonished at my ignorance of the background and life-story of a poet I thought I knew reasonably well. It seems he came from one of those over-achieving Victorian hothouse families that seemed to throw out prodigies in every direction. For example – and setting aside the brother who "became a world-famous expert on archaic and colloquial Chinese", or the uncle who "moved to Hawaii, where he learned Hawaiian and helped establish an Anglican bishopric in Honolulu" – I had no idea that his father Manley Hopkins was also a published poet, or that three of Gerard's brothers were artists and illustrators, often working in that finely-observed, realistic style that enlivened the pages of  magazines like Punch with their bafflingly unfunny cartoons. [2]

Sympathy

Mamma (to Cook) — "And Mrs. Stubbs, the cream with the apple-tart yesterday ought to have been whipped."

Ethel (who has a grateful remembrance of the dish in question). "Oh, Mummy dear! 'Ought to have been whipped!' I thought it was particularly good!"

Everard Hopkins, from The Project Gutenberg eBook of Punch, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892

Huh? Oh, right, "whipped" as in "whipped"... Hilarious. Anyway... They were quite some family. Although it seems Gerard's conversion to Catholicism (a fashionable rebellion at Oxford at the time) and subsequent career as a Jesuit priest (not so fashionable) made him into the family black sheep and something of an outcast. I suppose the equivalent today would be the son of some well-to-do and well-connected Hampstead-liberal family deciding to join Reform. Or, of course, to become a Jesuit priest.

But enough of this Victoriana: if you're interested, follow the link and read it for yourself. And if you've got a brilliant new caption for Everard's cartoon, don't keep it to yourself. Bear in mind, though, that unlike the original it has to be funny.

So here are some pied and dappled things:

1. True, we did use to make a prototype frisbee by interlacing them into something that resembled a ninja throwing star, or the "lock" of a traditional longsword dance. Like military plans, though, they rarely survived first contact with the enemy.

2. Although, stripped of their original verbose captions, those perfectly-captured expressions, body language, and social nuances do make excellent raw material for caption competitions. My best attempt: But, mother, it's not fair: when will I be old enough to indulge in Mrs. Kipling's exceedingly good hash brownies?