Certain words or phrases, passages from a favorite book or poem, can bind themselves to you just as certain metals lock themselves within organic compounds. There might be a lilt to the language, a rhythm which is in harmony with your blood’s beating: it connects with you inextricably, and forever thereafter you will carry it — chelate — inside.

Sometimes on sunny Sundays I will set out walking through our woods to Quarry Rock. Stepping carefully over the knuckled roots of fir trees, their boles like columns holding off the sky, I feel like a flea stumbling through the pelt of an enormous animal, an animal oblivious to my presence. I thread my way through a shadowed landscape, a gnarled terrain overlaid by a patchwork of sun which has slipped through the branches far above and laid itself down for me like a mottled carpet.

I am never alone for long on days like this, for I will often emerge from reverie to find Gerard Manley Hopkins walking at my side. One minute I am solitary, lost in thought; the next moment I will have his company; he will have slipped up on me silently when my thoughts were elsewhere, for what other word could describe the light falling on this forest-floor but Hopkins’ “dappled”?

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 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.

And when my path through the dappled forest opens out at Quarry Rock — Quarry Rock with its breathtaking view to the horizons, while far below me the kayaks creep silently across a surface hammered to silver by the late-February sun — Hopkins will be with me still.

He’ll be pointing out how the gulls stride high there on wimpling wings, and that they swoop “as a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend”

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.