Dappled

Glory be to God for dappled things -

That's the first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem Pied Beauty and although I'm not really with him in the "praise God" stakes, I've always thought it was astute of him to notice how lovely dappled things are.

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.

Too right, Gerard. I especially like dapples caused by the sunlight coming through things, as with the woodland floor, above.

Even one of our local roads looks good:

and here's Gledhow Woods in the Leeds suburbs:

I don't know why dappled woodland is so pleasing to the eye: perhaps it was that our woodland-dwelling ancestors liked it when they came out of the gloom of the forest into a clearing. Perhaps it's because they could see better and they could see that nothing was coming to eat them.

If you took a thousand people and showed them a piece of dappled woodland like this I don't think there'd be many who wouldn't like it: I'm sure that many of our likes and dislikes have their origins thousands of years ago.