This Is Just To Say

Glory be to God for dappled things—
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
     For rose-moles all in tipple 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;
His fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                            Praise him. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The kettle descants in a cosy drone,
And the young wife looks in her husband’s face,
And then at her guest’s, and shows in her own
Her sense that she fills an envied place;
And the visiting lady is all abloom,
And she says there was never so sweet a room.

And the happy young housewife does not know
That the woman beside her was first his choice,
Till the fates ordained it could not be so… .
Betraying nothing in look or voice
The guest sits smiling and sips her tea,
And he throws her a stray glance yearningly.

 Thomas Hardy