familiar. And then it was charged with meaning even as “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”.
“Glory be.” Glory – greatness – grandeur – these words all begin with g followed by the liquid l or r, and in the English language (another phrase with three small g’s) they all alliterate with God. They let us think, for instance, of the glory of the sun at sunrise and sunset, and the glory of the moon and the stars at night when the sky is uncluttered with clouds. They convey the impression of a certain divine radiance such as filled the tent of meeting and the temple of Jerusalem to indicate the Lord’s presence among his people. It was the same radiance that came upon Jesus both during his baptism in the river Jordan and during his transfiguration on the holy mountain.
“Glory be.” We also apply this radiance to the holiness of the saints as depicted in sacred art. We see it particularly around their heads in the form of haloes, and sometimes around their entire bodies. So when the prophet Isaiah beheld the divine vision in the temple, with the seraphim proclaiming, “Holy, holy, holy!” or as we put it in the Latin liturgy, “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus!” we may well feel like echoing them with the answering words, “Glory, glory, glory!” in accord with the song of the angels to the shepherds on the hills over Bethlehem. It is a word we feel like repeating over and over again. Such was the spirit of Handel in his unending repetition of the Hebrew acclamation in the Hallelujah Chorus of the “Messiah”. Of such a word, repeated again and again, it seems we never grow tired, especially when set to resounding music.
“Glory be.” In the same way, I may add with G.K. Chesterton, the sun itself never tires of rising or setting from day to day, but it goes on and on rising and setting. And then we may add, with Shakespeare, “till the last syllable of recorded time”.
“Glory be to God.” All this is, however, so traditional and conservative. It is all so foreign to the modern taste. Unlike the seraphim and cherubim, we so easily tire of repetition. Unlike the sun, the moon and the stars, unlike the birds who have only one song to sing, unlike the insects who are forever chirping on the same note, unlike even the poet Shakespeare, who dares to ask himself, “Why write I still all one, ever the same?” we find such repetition so boring, so banal,
“Glory be to God.” As Shakespeare also says, lamenting the modern taste of his time, “Novelty is only in request.” We are like the Athenians of Paul’s time who went around asking the same question again and again, “What’s the news?” They were always looking for something new, in worldly events and in human words. They never tired of variety, diversity, difference. And it is the same with us. This is why Hopkins, as a modern poet of the Victorian age, graciously condescends to humour us, or as we say, “to temper the cold wind to the shorn lamb”.
“Glory be to God.” Then how, we may ask, does he do it? How does he temper the cold wind of the English language to the sensitivity of us poor shorn lambs? Well, immediately on the heels of the all too banal ejaculation, “Glory be to God!” he hastens to add not “for all things” but “for dappled things”. Graciously he leaves all things to look after themselves. Instead he concentrates on what he interestingly calls “dappled things”.
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” “What are dappled things?” we ask, opening our eyes and pricking up our ears. That is the very question the poet evokes in our minds, awakening us in much the same way as Haydn awakens his audience in the course of his “Surprise Symphony”.
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” Thus he lulls us to sleep with his opening cry, “Glory be to God!” After all, it is what we expect of a priest, a minister of God, one whose profession it is to pray and give glory to God. So we nod our heads even before he gets to his sermon. But then he wakes us up with the startling, unexpected object, “for dappled things”. He wakes us up with things that are not simply of one color or one shade of color or merely black and white, but, as he goes on to say, with “skies of couple-color, as a brinded cow.”
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” Then, once again and inevitably, we ask, “What is a brinded cow?” Well she is a cow who isn’t just brown or white but both brown and white, or brown with white streaks. And still he pursues us with “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim”. He is looking in his imagination upon trout swimming in the clear water of a stream, and noting their round marks or moles colored like roses. And he likes the “stipple” of the rose-moles as an echo of “dapple”.
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” Nor is that all. The poet goes on and on, never wearying of adding example upon example of what he means by “dappled things”. It is perhaps only for variety’s sake, till he tires even the most modern of his readers. “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls,” he says, pointing to the “conkers” that have fallen to the ground from horse chestnut trees and burst open, revealing the “gold-vermilion” of their newly exposed nuts. “Finches’ wings”, he says, recalling the parti-colored wings of the chaffinch, the bullfinch, the goldfinch, and the greenfinch, while delighting in the f-alliteration of “finches” carried on from “fresh”, “firecoal” and “falls”. Finally, even Hopkins tires, if only for fear of having tired his readers. And so he throws in “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim” for good measure.
“All things.” Still, this is only the first part of this short or “curtal” sonnet. The poet now proceeds in the second part to take up “all things” which he has seemed to reject. Or rather, he adds to them, by way of epithetal precision. “All things,” he says, now adding epithet to epithet, as before he has added substantive to substantive, “counter, original, spare, strange”. In a word, he says, odd, eccentric, unique (like himself).
“All things.” Then untiringly he proceeds from epithets to phrases and clauses, “Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” There is no end to the examples he has up his sleeve for the unending entertainment of his readers, so long as they are willing to listen to him. There is no end to his witty versatility, his readiness with instances of “dappled things”, till his readers almost in spite of themselves can’t help stopping their ears and crying, “Enough! Enough!”
“Praise him.” Then it is that Hopkins cuts short this “curtal sonnet” of only ten and a half lines (instead of the customary fourteen) with what corresponds to the other Ignatian motto of LDS, “Laus Deo Semper”, that is, “Praise be to God forever”. His opening line has merely stated “Glory be to God”, or the Ignatian AMDG, with the specification “for dappled things”. But then he feels obliged to explain these “dappled things” with what are called (by a certain Father Rodriguez) “sundry examples”. And they take up the next five lines of what would otherwise have been the octet of a 14-line sonnet. Then again in the abbreviated sestet, after adding further examples in which he turns from nouns to adjectives, as objects, he comes in his conclusion to the main verb, “He fathers forth whose beauty is past change.”
“Praise him.” Here for the poet God isn’t only “God”, the supreme being above all things past, present and to come. He is also – as Jesus insists from the beginning of his public ministry, notably in his Sermon on the Mount – above all “Father” in relation to his Son. This isn’t only what Jesus repeats again and again in his sermons, culminating in his final discourse to the disciples at the Last Supper. It is also what the Father himself reveals in his two words uttered both at the baptism in the river Jordan and at the transfiguration on the holy mountain. Only, the poet isn’t content with the noun “Father”, but he must needs change it into a verb, “He fathers forth”.
“Praise him.” And then he must needs add the paradoxical phrase, if only to recall the flagging attention of his modern reader, “whose beauty is past change”. Yes, at the source of all this change, all
