Three Beautiful Things 03-15-2026: A Most Significant Poem in My Life, Too Much Pepper, House Cleaning Started

1. You and I might have something in common. 

Humor me, please, and see if what I'm about to say is also true for you. 

For most of my life, well, until today, I never gave a second's thought to why the Pied Piper of Hamelin was called "pied".

I focused on his piping and what he did with his magical pipe. 

Pied means multi-colored and the pied piper wore multicolored, patchwork clothing.

This is on my mind because today during his classical music radio program (on spokanepublicradio.org), Leonard Oakland read Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Pied Beauty".

When I was twenty years old, this poem spoke to me directly and enduringly about the nature of God. 

The glory of God lies in the world's pied beauty, its copious blend of multi-colored streaks, spots, plots, and contrasts. It lies in trout, chestnuts, finches, landscapes, trades (labor), and such opposites as sweet and sour, the dazzling and the dim, the swift and the slow and so on. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest and an innovative poet. 

I can't really articulate how I experience God, but certain poems (like certain music) help and this poem opened up a way for me to experience God that, fifty-two years ago, was transformative -- it also prepared my mind and spirit to enter into the world of Shakespeare who tirelessly explores co-existing opposites as a bedrock of reality and, like Hopkins, dives into reality's infinite variety. 

Hopkins' poem is at the end of this post. 

2.  When I host family dinner, as I will on March 16th, I strongly prefer preparing the main dish ahead of time, if possible. So, today, I made the Irish stew we'll eat on Monday.

Before I browned the beef cubes I'd cut up, I needed to flour and salt and pepper them.

In a bowl, I combined flour and salt and pepper, dropped in the meat, and browned a few batches of beef. 

I discovered later that I put too much pepper in that flour and that the stew's broth created an uncomfortable sensation of heat, not in my mouth, but in my throat. I went online and read about how to fix an over peppered stew and so on Monday I'll see if I can tame it. 

It'll help to have soda bread and a cool salad as part of our meal and I'm going to make cottage cheese available and, who knows?, if the stew is still too peppery at mealtime, I'll have sour cream out that some might like to try as a coolant. 

My hope, though, is that I can both dilute the stew a bit with beef broth and maintain its essential flavor. I know with some flour or corn starch and water, I can thicken it if need be.  I can also add carrots, celery, or potatoes to the stew and increase the amount of some of the ingredients I used to flavor it originally. 

Now a word from Captain Obvious: Having made this stew a day ahead of time gives me plenty of time to work with it more on Monday -- a significant relief.

3. Before I cooked stew this evening, I went to work on spiffing up the house. I have more to do on Monday, but some judicious sweeping and vacuuming gave me a pretty good start! 

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.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins