“Glory be to God for dappled things.” Reading that line for the first time, my only response was to pick up a dictionary and find the definition of dappled. I had stumbled upon “Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’ most famous poem, in a poetry anthology, and I had no idea what to make of its difficult syntax and seemingly archaic vocabulary. Moreover, most of the imagery was lost to me; having spent my life safely settled in suburbia, I had never seen trout, chestnut-falls, or finches’ wings. Still, who couldn’t help but smile in picturing “skies of couple-colour” or “landscape plotted and pieced?” Although the meaning of the poem was a mystery, I was enthralled by the unparalleled richness of Hopkins’ language, teeming with alliteration, rhyme, and irregular rhythm. After reading the poem a few times, absorbing the language but not the meaning, I set it aside as a challenge to be faced when I had developed a deeper understanding of poetry.

As it turned out, it wasn’t greater knowledge that I needed to understand the poem, but an experience to connect the words with my life. This occurred unexpectedly on a bright spring day, when I was driving on a particularly beautiful road next to a row of trees. The sun was shining onto the leaves, illuminating some, while others remained shaded. Before my eyes was a marvelous juxtaposition of bright and dark, like a mosaic made up of myriad tiles expertly mixed together, each a different shade of green. Struck by this, just one word sprang to mind; dappled. That mysterious word which had bewildered me months earlier now manifested itself in front of me. There was that entrancing combination of “adazzle, dim,” and seeing this, I fell in love with “all things counter, original, spare, strange.”

This poem gave voice to something that had been stirring in me for years: a love of oddness, eccentricity, irregularity. It was a liberation from the narrow idea of beauty that I’d faced, as a child, when playing with Barbie dolls or watching princess movies. This emphasis on strangeness as a part of nature inspired me to embrace my own abnormalities, from my gapped teeth to my Lord of the Rings obsession, and to cherish the idiosyncrasies I see in others. Like Hopkins, I am in awe of the strange beauty that surrounds me.

For me, the words of this poem never diminish. From time to time, I walk on a path through a forest near my house. At one point, the tall trees on both sides of the path lean towards each other, their longest limbs just meeting and forming an arch high above my head. On a bright day, the sun shines through the leaves like stained glass, and every shade of green glows above me. I am in a magnificent cathedral. At these moments, Hopkins’ words resonate within; “Glory be to God for dappled things.”