The contrast in Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "Pied Beauty" only becomes evident in the final two lines. The poet begins by praising God for "dappled things," and most of the poem is given over to elaborating the variety of the many beautiful dappled things that exist. There are "brinded" or brindled (striped) cows, stippled trout, and fields "plotted and pieced." The poem is full of clever synonyms for "dappled," including, in the second stanza, "freckled" and "adazzle," and, in the title, "pied."

What is important about "dappling" is that it is inconstant. It is present in some places but not in others. The cows have coloration in their stripes, the trout in their stipples, and so on. The very idea of dappling relies on contrast—you see the spots because they contrast with the background. That is why Hopkins begins the second stanza by evoking "All things counter, original, spare, strange": if they were neither original nor strange, we might never notice them.

The poem highlights the contrast between the many dappled, pied, and inconstant things, beautiful as they are, and that from which they are "father[ed]-forth." If we find beauty in a cow's stripes, a fish's spots, and a field's plowed rows, then don't we find something in common between all these seemingly "strange" and "original" things? What is it they have in common? Well, Hopkins might say that it's beauty itself, or God, "whose beauty is past change." It's past, or beyond, change because it is what all the world's varied beauties have in common: it (or He) fathers them forth.

In this poem, Hopkins contrasts the changeable beauty of life on earth with God's unchanging beauty. The first stanza begins by describing parts of nature that are always varying: skies that show different colors ("couple-colour"), light that flickers and reflects on the trout as they swim and leap through the water, the way a bird's wings flutter, and even what humankind produces: landscapes partially plowed for crops and partially lying fallow or unused. He also notices the "trades" or manufacturing projects that add variety to the landscape.

The second and last stanza of this short poem praises God, who can never change and who is whole and unified, for creating what is "original ... strange ... freckled." What the poet sees all around him, every fleeting moment of beauty, causes him to appreciate the mystery and goodness of God. The poet doesn't try to understand why God delights in bestowing such variety on humans. Instead, Hopkins notices and celebrates all these things.