Worship & Wonder 3: Wonder

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.

‘Pied Beauty’

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I remember this as being one of the first poems my parents ever introduced me to, and it remains a favourite. ‘Dappled things’ became a kind of shorthand for ‘Glory’ for me, and I still greet trout skies with a salute of recognition for Hopkins and my Creator.

It is only as I write this that I realise that this shorthand may have become so embedded in my subconscious that it was responsible for the early fascination with light and shadow which led me to pick up a camera at the age of seven or so.

But what an increased fascination with contemplative photography has brought me in recent years is the subject which lies at the turning point of Hopkin’s poem:

All things.

This is what Lent brings too: a prolonged opportunity to scrutinise all things, whatever their characteristics, both within me and outside of me.  

swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim

This scrutiny is designed to lead me back to the ‘father’; to lead me back and back and back to the point and reason of Praise.

There is no subject that is unworthy of photography, no subject beneath notice; there is no circumstance or situation, no matter how I feel about myself or others, that is not a vehicle which might lead me back to the point of Praise.

All might be, can be Glory.

All might be, can be a window onto Wonder.

Am I willing to look so hard for such beauty?

spare & strange. Canon 7d. f6.3. 1/250. ISO 100.