Baker's Delicious

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 all trades, 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

The picture triggered a memory of this being presented to me by an idealistic young English teacher, at a time when I was far too young and callow to appreciate it - though I was probably the only one in the class who understood 'fold, fallow, and plough' 

As I understand it, Hopkins most probably frightened himself by discovering as a mid 19th century Oxford fresher that he was gay, and dealt with it by converting to Catholicism and entering the most austere branch of its priesthood, the Jesuits. He spent most of his short life thereafter in various degrees of depression, dying when he was 44, and declaring himself happy only on his deathbed 

He allowed himself to write poetry only if it served a religious purpose, but it's the beauty of the words in the middle that appeals to me, rather than the pious top and tail, or the closing contrast between the variability of 'creation' and the immutability of his concept of its creator

I took the picture to illustrate that even if the year yields a dearth of honey, we might have the sweetness of some apples. As you can imagine, I'm looking for good news stories