"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Mea culpa: When I said "anagram," I meant to say acronym! 

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-Fabulous crafter of verse A.E. Stallings

-Her upcoming Hudson Review piece "Frieze Frame" and recent Selected Poems "This Afterlife"

-New deats on Keats

-The controversh of Hopkins' verse

-The life and times of Gerard

-Toward a definition of "Inscape"

-Anagogy and Four-Fold Interpretation

-Christ as the code of the universe software

-Duns Scotus returns!

-Haecceity vs. Quiddity

-Haecceity as the root of love

-Anglo-Saxon verse and "sprung rhythm"

-Cynghanedd!!

-Metrical counterpoint

-Ave, Secundus Paeon

-Kings, fishes, dragons, flies, fire

-The Ichthys

-The union of sense and sensibility

-We, the lovable characters in Christ's masquerade.

Text of poem:

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2-8: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hey everyone, welcome to this week’s episode. Thank you so much for listening, and if you haven’t already please consider rating or reviewing the show, and recommending it to someone you think might enjoy it— all of those things do make a serious difference in growing the listenership of the podcast, and I really do appreciate it. 

Before we properly begin, I’d like to revisit my recent episode on Keats for a moment. A few days ago, I was talking to the wonderful poet and classicist Alicia Stallings, professionally known as A.E. Stallings, about this episode, and while she graciously expressed appreciation and admiration for my analysis, she also pointed out a couple of critical background details that I had missed. Stallings herself is in the midst of preparing an article on the history and literary reception of the Parthenon Marbles, entitled “Frieze Frame,” for the upcoming 75th anniversary Spring issue of the Hudson Review, and so she’s been steeped in the relevant lore on this subject for a couple of years. It promises to be an amazing piece of journalism, I can’t wait to read it, and I’d highly recommend to all of you to check it out when it comes out. 

Alicia pointed out that Keats’s sonnet was addressed to his painter friend Benjamin Haydon. In her words: 

“Haydon was one of the world's leading experts on the Marbles at the time--he'd spent countless hours drawing them when they were still in a tent in Park Lane and dragging all his friends to see them. His enthusiasm for them was obsessive and boundless. I imagine Keats was a little overwhelmed! The idea of the eagle may have entered in two associations-- there is an eagle missing from Zeus's throne, and "eagle" is also a direct translation of the Greek term for pediment (Aetoma meaning Eaglement) and shows up this way in English in some of the Committee discussion. Etc. I don't think that at all undermines the cloudy Romantic thought process you describe so well--my suggestion is just that these words were also "in the air" in that room.”

Thank you so much for that, Alicia. To all of my listeners, I urge you to go check out not only her upcoming article but her newly released collection of Selected Poems, entitled This Afterlife, which I’m currently reading and is a beautiful retrospective on an incredible career. A.E. Stallings ranks in the pantheon of my previous featured poets Dick Davis, Matthew Buckley Smith, and Bill Coyle as one of the finest contemporary practitioners of formal verse, and I hope to feature one of her own poems on Versecraft in the near future. 

Now, without further ado, let’s talk about the most fascinatingly strange poet of the Victorian era, a man often considered to be the greatest devotional poet since George Herbert, the one and only Gerard Manley Hopkins. In my experience, Hopkins is a poet people either love or can’t stand—there is very little middle ground. I do hope however to find some middle ground today. I dedicate this episode to the people I know who love Hopkins, which include my dear friend Felipe, my own mother, and wunderkind co-host of Sleerickets Cameron Clark. I don’t know if Cameron listens to my show, but if you do, this one’s for you mate. 

The major point of contention between Hopkins lovers and Hopkins haters is his incredibly unique and flashy style— his linguistically ostentatious, prosodically heterodox,  emotionally ecstatic way of expressing himself. In order to appreciate what this style is like however, it must be heard, so I’ll delay my discussion of style until after my recitation. First, let’s learn a little about the man himself. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins lived from 1844-1889, an almost exact contemporary of last episode’s poet, Emily Dickinson, and is probably the only poet of that generation, with the possible exception of Walt Whitman, who can match Dickinson for uniqueness of voice and vision. Incidentally, his grandfather had gone to college with second-to-last week’s poet, John Keats. Hopkins was born just outside London to a large, extremely educated and artistic family: His father was a poet, his uncle was a Hawaiian politician, his great-uncle was an artist, two of his brothers became artists, one sister became a composer, and another brother became a celebrated philologist of ancient Chinese. Hopkins himself initially aspired to be an artist, and his early training in draughtsmanship, which he treasured as long as he lived, no doubt influenced the vivid sense of imagery he would later showcase in his poetry. 

As a young artist, Hopkins had been enthralled by the teachings of John Ruskin, who preached not only the close observation of natural detail, a tenet which Hopkins would later incorporate into his own theory of poetry, but an admiration for and advocacy of medieval life, a life fully steeped in Christianity and the Church. Upon enrolling at Oxford, and there swept up by the beauty of the Gothic atmosphere, Hopkins came under the influence of both the great Catholic theologian John Henry Newman, who had converted many figures at Oxford, and the Catholic devotional poet Christina Rossetti, who soon replaced John Keats as Hopkins’ poetic idol. At 22 Hopkins converted, and was received into the Catholic Church by Newman himself, much to the chagrin of Hopkins’ Anglican family. Two years later, in the May of 1868, Hopkins resolved to join the Jesuit Order, and, convinced that poetry was an egocentric distraction from his religious path, burned all the poems he had on hand, and did not write another line for seven years. 

Finally, in 1875, Hopkins was asked by his religious superior to write a commemorative poem on a recent maritime tragedy, a commission which resulted in Hopkins’ now famous poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a work which showed the first indication of Hopkins’ formal experiments and mature style. Though the poem was never published by the Jesuits, the sanction from his order to write verse gave Hopkins the resolve to begin his life as poet once more. Nevertheless, the poetic life was never easy for Hopkins— he was always tormented by the idea that his artistic ambitions and his ascetic commitments, his Ignatian imperatives to glorify God’s creation and also to live detached from the world, sabotaged one another. As a result, he never published his poetry, showing it only to a few close friends, including his former Oxford schoolmate and later British poet laureate Robert Bridges. 

After over a decade of hard study, Hopkins finally achieved his ordination in the Jesuit Order in 1877. Now nearly in the final decade of his life, Hopkins took teaching and ministering positions around the British Isles, ultimately ending up as a teacher of Classical languages at University College Dublin. Lonely, far from home, artistically isolated, estranged from his family, and disrespected by his students, Hopkins fell into a deep depression, a depression which resulted in his famous series of “terrible sonnets,” which movingly illustrate his state of mind and a severe crisis of faith. In 1889, at the age of 44, Hopkins died of Typhoid fever. His friend Robert Bridges, one of Hopkins fiercest and only artistic supporters during his life, used his influence to publish Hopkins’ poetry, which over time, due to its spiritual power and substantial formal innovations, became, like Emily Dickinson’s poetry, a touchstone for modernist poets who sought an alternative to the mainstream tradition of Victorian verse. Today, Hopkins is a widely celebrated figure whose fiercely religious, formally acrobatic verse has been an inspiration to poets, nature lovers, and spiritual seekers all over the world. 

As I mentioned earlier, despite his popularity, some people continue to find Hopkins’ style off-putting, either because they find it difficult to understand or else extravagantly playful and excessively emotional. I believe that given adequate attention, Hopkins is not nearly so difficult as he is presumed to be; I do however often sympathize with the latter critique. Hopkins’ style is so energetic, so densely musical, so overflowingly passionate, that it is really only appropriate for a very limited range of subject matter—outside of that range it can sound hysterical, and even within that range, it is liable to sacrifice precision of idea or description for grammatical pyrotechnics and emotional overflow. All of that being said, there are times in his poetry when the hammer of style hits the nail of substance on the head perfectly, and the result is breathtaking. 

To me, the finest instance of this is found in today’s poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” It is my very favorite of his, largely because it perfectly and powerfully illustrates the theological idea which was the guiding principle behind his artistic life: the concept of inscape. 

Scholars have argued incessantly about what exactly Hopkins meant by “inscape,” so far be it from me to claim that I have the authoritative answer. Nevertheless, I think that to best understand “inscape” one must understand two other terms: anagogy and haecceity.

Now I know that’s probably only confused you more but bear with me here. In both the Jewish and Christian traditions of biblical exegesis, which is to say biblical interpretation and commentary, it has often been understood that when one is analyzing a given passage of text, there are four different ways you can interpret that text: #1. You can interpret it literally, taking the words at face value. #2. You can interpret it typologically, meaning that you interpret the events and characters of the story as an allegorical reference to some other set of events and characters. In Christianity, typological interpretation is often used to show how passages in the Old Testament prefigure passages in the New Testament. #3 You can interpret it tropologically, meaning that you analyze the story for the moral insight that it’s meant to impress upon the reader. Finally, on the fourth and deepest level, you can interpret a text anagogically, meaning that you seek out the mystical meaning of the text, the way by which the text can reveal to you things about the nature of God and the universe. For those interested, Dante Alighieri himself explains this four-fold system of interpretation in his famous Letter To Can Grande. 

It’s this fourth kind of interpretation, anagogy, with which we’re concerned here. To many religious people, not just the bible but the world itself, as God’s creation, is seen as a kind of divine text which is meant to be interpreted. Many Christians, following the opening verse of the Gospel of John, “In the Beginning Was the Word,” see Jesus Christ as the divine utterance which created the world, and the world itself as an extension of Christ, the incarnated text of God’s will. Thus, by studying and interpreting Nature, one can gain insight into the nature of God. This was a common belief in Victorian England and is no doubt what lay behind John Ruskin’s religiously motivated injunction to artists to capture nature accurately and precisely. Furthermore, an essential teaching of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, is that God can be found in all things. To Hopkins then, who absorbed all these influences, it was a given that God could be anagogically revealed in the study of the natural world. In his commentary on the central text of the Jesuit Order, Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, Hopkins wrote: “This world is word, expression, news of God”; it is a book he has written.... a poem of beauty: what is it about? His praise, the reverence due to him, the way to serve him.... Do I then do it? Never mind others now nor the race of man: DO I DO IT?” One need look no further than this to discover Hopkins’s central motivation for writing poetry. 

But how do we observe nature properly? How do we read the text of the world which it is our duty to interpret? This brings us to our second word: haecceity. Haecceitas, a term invented by the Medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, whom you might remember from my Cunningham episode, can be translated into English as the word “thisness.” This can be contrasted to the word quidditas or quiddity, which means “whatness.” Quiddity asks, what is a thing? What makes a cat a cat, a chair a chair, or a human a human? What is its essence? By contrast, haecceity asks, what makes a cat this cat, a chair this chair, a human this human? What distinguishes it from others of its type, what makes it unique, independent, distinctive? Haecceity is a word we rarely use, but the idea is actually incredibly important to us, because it is the root of love. Why do we love our cats, our spouses, our personal objects, and not other cats, spouses, or objects? Because we have come to know them and appreciate them because they are exactly what they are, and nothing else. We love them for their haecceity. 

Hopkins was absolutely enamored of the idea of haecceity, and enamored of Duns Scotus in general. In a poem of his entitled “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” Hopkins described Scotus as the man “who of all men most sways my spirit to peace;/of reality the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not/rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece.” High praise indeed. Some have even speculated that it was encountering the work of Scotus during his studies that convinced Hopkins to return to poetry after years of ascetic absence.

For Hopkins, as for John Ruskin, haecceity was the key to pursuing an anagogical interpretation of the universe. By concentrating on the exact, unique way in which a particular flower or tree, falcon or human being was beautiful, one could gain a greater appreciation for the handiwork of God, and imitate God’s love by cherishing the individuality of all creation. It was this special power of an object’s individuality to point to divine beauty which Hopkins called its “inscape.” To finally define Inscape then: we might say that it is the way in which the haecceity of an object anagogically reveals the nature of divinity. The perception of Inscape, the reception of this beauty and knowledge, Hopkins called “instress.” 

Now, finally, we are ready to read our poem, which is nothing if not an ode to Inscape. It goes like this: 

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Reading a Hopkins poem aloud is more fun than reading almost anything else: the words just pop and sizzle off the tongue. By the number of lines and the rhyme scheme, we can tell that this poem is an Italian sonnet—in fact, it has exactly the same kind of rhyme scheme as the Keats poem two episodes back. I don’t want to spend any time talking about Italian sonnets today though, because I’ve already covered them quite thoroughly elsewhere, and there’s too much else to get to. 

Instead, let’s talk about why this poem sizzles and pops the way it does. There are several reasons why. The first has to do with what Hopkins called “sprung rhythm.” Hopkins was a huge fan of Anglo-Saxon poetry, a poetic tradition which doesn’t use the accentual-syllabic system we’ve been focusing on in this podcast, but instead measures its meter purely by accents alone, without any regard for syllable count. A typical line of Anglo-Saxon poetry, like in Beowulf, for instance, is a tetrameter line in the sense that it has four accents per line, but as long as it has four accented syllables, it can have any number of unaccented ones—they don’t have to be measured out into feet. 

As I’ve mentioned before however, this doesn’t mean that writing Anglo-Saxon verse was a walk in the park. There were other restrictions— three out of the four accents had to alliterate, and there needed to be a sizable caesura between accents two and three. The use of accentual verse combined with copious alliteration and pauses gives Anglo-Saxon poetry a punchiness which was very appealing to Hopkins, and Hopkins even taught himself Old English in order to understand it better. Through his studies of Anglo-Saxon verse, Hopkins concluded that accentual verse, unlike accentual-syllabic verse, operates through the use of sprung rhythm; that is, rhythm is created by using heavy accents to propel forth an indefinite number of weaker syllables, similar to how a strong flick sends a rock skipping across a pond. By placing strong accents at semi-regular intervals, a poet can keep up a surging patter of syllables all the way through the poem. 

In his own poetry, Hopkins combined this idea of “sprung rhythm” with his own foundation in traditional accentual-syllabic meter—the result is a metrical scheme which mostly adheres to accentual syllabic norms, but due to its focus on accents rather than feet, the lines can be irregular, the accents can be especially pronounced, and the metrical substitutions are very frequent. You’ll also notice that Hopkins loves to alliterate, and this alliteration adds to the punchy, Anglo-Saxon effect of his poetry. 

However, Anglo-Saxon poetry was not the only old poetic tradition upon which Hopkins drew. During his time studying for his ordination, Hopkins spent several years in Wales, where he learned the Welsh language and studied the incredibly musical tradition of Welsh poetry. Welsh verse is constructed according to a system called Cynghanedd, which means harmony, and involves intricate patterns of stress, alliteration, and rhyme which are too complex for me to get into here. For our purposes, we can simply say that Hopkins was inspired by Welsh verse to include a copious amount of consonance, assonance, and internal rhyme in his poetry, on top of the alliteration, sprung rhythm, and compound phrasing he borrowed from Anglo-Saxon poetry, as well as the iambic rhythms and structural rhyme schemes borrowed from traditional accentual-syllabic verse. The result is the potent cocktail of verbal gymnastics we see here, and yes, I think the mixed metaphor is appropriate. 

To see more closely what Hopkins is doing, let’s return to the first stanza: 

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

            The first seven of these eight lines contain alliteration; lines 3, 4, and 5 give us an exciting chain of internal rhyme: from “stones ring” and “tucked string” in line 3, to “hung bell’s bow swung finds tongue” in lines 3 and 4, to “fling out broad” and “each mortal thing” in lines 4 and 5. 

If we scan this poem according to our accentual-syllabic system of feet, we discover some interesting patterns: though the number of accents per line does fluctuate, it only fluctuates between 4 and 6, and the majority are 5. On top of this, three out of the four lines with five accents—lines 2, 4, and 5—can be scanned as perfect iambic pentameter, though line four is complicated by an abundance of speech stresses. Somewhat like Janet Lewis in a previous episode, Hopkins maintains just enough of the iambic pentameter norm to keep the meter in our heads, while at the same point providing what he called “counterpoint” rhythms against the meter. 

            One of the most distinguishing aspects of this counterpoint rhythm is the abundance of cretic substitutions. You may recall that a cretic is a three syllable foot that goes strong-weak-strong: BUM-ba-BUM. Normally this is a very rare foot to encounter, but Hopkins has a whopping 5 in this 8 line stanza. We find them in “tucked string tells,” “each hung bells,” “each one dwells,” “goes itself,” “do is me.” When you add these to the double trochaic substitutions at the beginnings of lines 3 and 8, you can see that there a prominent downward motion throughout this stanza which counterpoints against the upward motion of the iambic norm, resulting in a dynamic tug of war in the sound of this poem. 

            In my view, the most prosodically interesting line is actually the first, because it starts off the poem with a foot so rare I had to look it up to see what it was called. Some may disagree with me, but I scan the phrase “As Kingfishers” as one long four syllable foot: one unaccented syllable, one accented syllable, two unaccented syllables: bum-BUM-bum-bum. Any four syllable foot that has one strong accent is called a Paeon, and because this one has the accent in the second syllable, it is called a Secundus Paeon. In my scansion, the full reading of this line is thus: Secundus Paeon, amphibrach, dactyl, iamb. Were it not for the swift introduction of perfect iambic pentameter in line two, we would be completely lost, or perhaps tempted to read the parallel construction of line one as an indication that we are about to read a poem in parallelist verse. 

            As interesting as all of that is, let’s get into what the poem is actually saying: “As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” Already there is so much to look at here. On a literal level, Hopkins is describing the particular way that sunlight displays iridescence on the wing of a kingfisher, a beautiful and colorful little bird, and on the diaphanous wing of a dragonfly. As we know however, literal interpretation is only one way to look at it. Let’s think about the word kingfisher. It sounds incredibly biblical. We are reminded of how God and Jesus are so often referred to as “King,” as well as how Jesus called upon Peter and Andrew in Matthew 4:19 to be “fishers of men.” The kingfisher then, the King who fishes for the souls of men, is a clear allusion to Christ, and immediately brings together, as Hopkins is wont to do, the beauty of the natural world with God’s divinity. 

            We can also read this in another interesting way. You might be familiar with the so-called “Jesus Fish,” an icon often seen on bumper stickers in the American South. This odd association derives from the use of a fish as a secret symbol of Christ by which Christians identified themselves to one another during the early years of Christianity, when the faith was persecuted by the Romans. They chose a fish because the word for fish in Greek is ichthys, which can serve as an anagram, in Greek, for “Jesus anointed of God, son and savior.” In this context, a kingfisher, so-called because of its affinity for hunting fish, could be seen as the human soul, hungry for and hunting out the body of Christ. 

By extension, to “catch fire” may refer to the soul becoming possessed by the Holy Spirit and the beauty of the world. OR, more metaphysically, if we go back to the Kingfisher as Christ, it could refer to Christ himself “catching fire” by becoming the world during the act of creation. This may seem far-fetched, but we should recall that Hopkins has another poem entitled “That Nature Is A Heraclitean Fire,” which pursues the metaphor of nature as fire due to the constant change and destruction that it embodies. We should also recall that Jesus is often referred to as “The Light of the World.” 

The plot thickens even more when we get to the word dragonfly. If we break down the word, what creatures do we get? dragons and flies. Both of which are associated with, you guessed it, Satan. The juxtaposition of kingfishers and dragonflies is therefore more than just a pretty scene: it’s an indication of how the cosmic war between good and evil plays out on even the smallest scale. 

In the next three lines, Hopkins switches to aural description to illustrate how other things beautifully display their originality: the ringing of different stones falling down wells, the plucking of different strings (tucking here is a variation on plucking), and the pealing of different bells each have their own unique sound, their own name. He goes on to say, “each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/deals out that being indoors each one dwells.” That is to say, it is the sole duty of every mortal thing to display its “indoors,” its uniquely beautiful inscape, its thisness, to the world. In the next line, Hopkins uses “selves” as a verb—a thing “selves” by doing what it’s meant to do and asserting its identity in the world: “What I do is me: for that I came.” Hopkins is effectively saying that the meaning of life is for every individual thing in creation to advertise its own special beauty to everything else. 

That, by the way, is why I think Hopkins’ style is perfectly suited to this poem: the poem is about the glory of uniqueness, and the poem is itself absolutely bursting with the beautiful uniqueness of Gerard’s own mind and soul—it is the poem which his style was meant to write. Not only is the style itself unique, but in its strange and energetic language it brings out the sense of overflowing uniqueness in other objects. The poem is a masterful integration of sense and sensibility. 

Now let’s incorporate the second stanza, and read the poem all the way through: 

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Assuming that my show notes allow for them, you’ll notice that several words in this stanza have accent marks over them—this was Hopkins’ way of indicating, when in doubt, which syllables should receive the accent. In lines 9 through 11, we have perhaps the most clear-cut example of Hopkins’ use of counterpoint: line 9 is an acephalous line of iambic pentameter, line 10 begins with an iamb but is then entirely trochaic, and line 11 reverses the pattern of line 10, beginning with a trochee but then switching to iambic for the remainder of the line. 

Interestingly, once we get to this sestet, the number of accents per line completely stabilizes to pentameter, and we get no more cretic substitutions. It is as if, now that he has come to the theological reflection part of his poem, Hopkins wishes to sober up, at least somewhat, and present a more serious voice to us. 

With the phrase “I say more” marking the volta of this sonnet, Hopkins turns from considering rocks and birds to the human being’s relation to inscape. In saying “The just man justices,” Hopkins is claiming that our outward actions depend upon the unique quality of our souls—the soul that “keeps grace,” “keeps all his goings graces.” Exterior actions are an expression of inner nature, the revelation of the inscape. The human being who keeps grace “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—Christ.” That is, the human being endowed with grace is observed by God to act out exactly what God made that person to be, which is nothing less than an expression of Christ Himself. Because Christ is also God, this turns the phrase “God’s eye” into a pun—a human being acts not only beneath the eye of God, but act’s in God’s capital I, a being made in God’s image who is both a creation and an expression of divinity.  

In this almost pantheistic vision, Christ is more than God made flesh in the personage of Jesus— he is the cosmic Christ, God made flesh in the materiality of the world, the word of spacetime written on the blank canvas of the void. This Christ “plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his to the Father through the features of men’s faces.” 

            The purpose of creation, Hopkins seems to say, is playfulness and loveliness. The unique and thereby lovable identities of creation are like masks that Christ wears in order to delight His Father. Crucially for Hopkins, such beauty, loveliness, playfulness, is only possible, only discernable through the appreciation of creatures and objects as individuals. Each of us, in our own unique and inimitable way, is a gateway to the Lord. 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s experience this poem one last time, as an old friend:

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.