"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.