Pied Beauty

3 minutes

• SATB choir

Commissioned by Anna Mae Patterson in thanksgiving for choral singing friends and her parents, Barbara E and George W Patterson.

“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;Let no man come into this hall,
Whatever is fickle, freckeld (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him.