【09】Pied Beauty—驳杂之美

Dana Gioia

Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of the mostexperimental, playful, and difficult poets ever to write in English. Althoughhis poems make profound sense, what attracts you first is the force of theirsound. Here again, is Kay Ryan. 

Kay Ryan

“Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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 pastchange:

                                Praise him. 

Kay Ryan

He has these crazy rhymes. He's just an insanerhymer and I just get such a kick out of the stuff he puts in here. I love “fickle,freckled” all those beautiful things that are stuck together. And look at… dappled,stipple, fallow, fickle, freckled, [laughing] adazzle. [laughing] I mean,that's just so funny to me. Partly he's just he's just so filled with ecstasy,he’s so ecstatic, that he's laughing and I think his poems are just laughing.Sometimes they're ecstatic with grief, but that's a kind of a laughter, too,there is a laughter of grief.