included in Hopkins’s praise: ‘And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.’ For example, a farmer who uses a plough will have harnesses for the plough-horses, a colours to signify his rank.
In the quatrain, Hopkins uses a variety of adjectives, nouns and verbs to try to encapsulate how very different and special every single thing is. As in the sestet, are opposite, unique, limited and unusual: ‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’. For everything sour; adazzle, dim’ God alone, whose beauty never changes, is responsible: ‘He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change’. The tail piece of this poem is a simple, yet iconic, phrase: ‘Praise him’. There is no doubt that that is what this sonnet does.