Paying Attention To The Sky

Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough...

This is not the first time I have introduced this poem on Paying Attention To The Sky, but I shall do it again to showcase Anthony Esolen’s prodigious talents of interpretation. I first studied the poem back in a lit class in college and counted syllables and stress, marveling at the intricacies of structure and form of the sonnet. Elsewhere I have related how this poem can easily become a prayer — a cool summer morning following several days in the nineties — you can memorize this and recite it on the way to bus stop. You’ll be surprised how many more counter, original, spare, strange things you’ll notice on the way to work.

“God is Love”
WE ARE USED TO hearing the biblical verse, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and nodding knowingly to ourselves. “Ah yes,” says the modern agnostic with a taste for religion. “I don’t know whether God exists, but I do know that if he does, then He is love. So I will try to live according to love.”

That’s better than nothing. But we are too familiar with the verse. We no longer hear its thundering challenge to the entire Greek philosophical system.

For if God is love and not necessity (since what is determined or compelled cannot be an act of love), then none of this universe need have been. Nor need it have been the way it is now. The belief that God creates from nothing, freely, is a logical consequence of believing that he creates from love.

But how can God love man? God needs nothing from man, not even man’s love. Christians believe that God already is a communion of three persons bound by love, each distinct, yet each fully God. Man knows a trace of the love that moves God, or that is God’s movement within himself: as he moves not from need, but from superabundance, from generosity one might even say from playfulness.

Man will cherish animals from which he derives nothing of use; he will potter about a flower garden for delight in the flowers; his heart will soar at the strains of music; he cheers at the sight of a big and boisterous; family. Unlike every other creature on earth, man needs what he does not need, and loves where he does not lack — and he feels that he loves more fully from his plenty and strength, from his fascination with life, and from his will-to-beauty, than from his sense of incompleteness and insufficiency. In those high-hearted moments, man is close to God.

In no classical author do we find the great Zeus, father of gods and men stooping to limn a blade of grass or smooth out a dewdrop. Such affairs would be relegated to some deity so low on the scale as to he nameless. But our God, who made even the creeping things that creep upon the earth, who cares for ostrich egg because the hen is too bird-brained to do it herself (Job 39:13), whose kingdom is as a mustard seed, and who decks the lilies of the field in such glory as would put to shame the tailors of Solomon, delights in works. He enjoys them, he calls them good, he loves them. And, to paraphrase Jesus, if God so loves the grass, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more does he love us, us of the hard hearts?

We might think such things beneath our notice, but the incomparably great God notices them. Small as they are, they provide for the attentive a powerful way to draw closer to the heart of the Lord (Paying Attention, don’t you see!!!). Such was the insight of the Victorian priest-poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The more unusual creature, the more it is peculiarly itself, the greater the delight. Consider this magnificent miniature sonnet on the beauty of all things great and small:

                           Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-color as 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.

The bustling corral of things animate and inanimate defies category, exactly as Hopkins intends. No one really looks upon the sky and thinks of the splotches on a calico cow, probably because no one looks appreciatively enough at the sky and its cowishness, or at a cow and its reflection of a weathering sky. That odd second line brings heaven to earth with a delightful bump. The point, after all, is that heaven can be seen where no one sees it, especially upon the peculiarly beautiful things of earth — on the rosy stipples of a freshwater trout, for instance.

Not only there, though; Hopkins would never settle for being a dreamy little nature poet, a devotee of the pretty, and therefore a pretender of love. For how can you love weeds and thrush’s eggs and not love man?

If God delights in the making of chestnuts, the more does he delight in waking beings who can delight also in his making of chestnuts and everything else. Therefore, man, his labor and his ingenuity, must also be praised; for the quirky beauty of man’s own creativity, as evinced in sickles and ice-tongs and flails and adzes, reflects its source, the beauty of God. Fishing lures, wrenches, lathes, ropes and pulleys, pails of tar, seedbags and harrows, all in “trim,” in order, share in Hopkins’s hymn to muscular love.

But in the second stanza the poet leaves these particular things behind and turns his attention to their typical qualities — there is not one specific noun for the rest of the poem. That is because he wants to reverse the kaleidoscope: we shift our sights from the ever-changing and exuberantly various individual things to the never-changing God who made them.

Now the ironic thing about this shift is not just that a never-changing God would create things which, since they are not God, would be subject to change. It is rather that God would delight in having his never-changing beauty pieced out among, refracted through, so many forms and so odd. Yet it is no derogation of his one and eternal beauty that it should be made manifest in the swift and the slow, the dazzling and the dim. For he does not simply make, as an artificer. He “fathers-forth.”

We should meditate upon that phrase. It suggests neither the pantheism latent in earth-mother cults (whose goddess is identified with the mindless fecundity of nature), nor the fatalism latent in rationalistic theologies such as deism. God “fathers-forth”– the begetter and maker of what he did not have to beget or make. He has loved all things into being.

Begetting them, he is to be found by means of them, whether the spiraling galaxy or the conch on the shore. Man’s proper response, then, after he has paid his loving attention to trout and finches and things that show forth that breathless list of adjectives, is a quiet movement of the heart: “Praise him.” Two simple words, for a simple act that does not change: praising the Maker of change, who dwells in eternal light.