Today’s Poem: As Kingfishers Catch Fire

Revisiting Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ohara Koson, Kingfisher Hunting for Fish, 1900 (Wikimedia Commons)

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(We’re taking a break, here at Poems Ancient and Modern: our first vacation since we started this newsletter a year and a half ago. But not to leave you in the lurch, we’re offering a week or so of some of our favorites from the archives of the newsletter.)

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As Kingfishers Catch Fire

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.
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Today’s Poem, like “The Windhover” and “God’s Grandeur,” springs from that fertile year, 1877, a time of notable output in the poetic life of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). That year, also the year of his ordination to the Jesuit priesthood, was a productive, even prolific period for Hopkins. In the course of the spring and summer, he wrote eleven sonnets among which numbered some of his most enduringly fine and ambitious poems.

But more than that, 1877 marks a turning point in Hopkins’s understanding. This first mature creative surge was marked by new philosophical and theological insight. In fact, we can best understand that creative surge as a function of a breakthrough in the poet’s vision, in which propositions about reality and identity — chiefly the propositions of the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus, whom he had begun reading some five years earlier — revealed themselves to be as foundational to his poetics as his prosodic scheme already was.

In that great surge of 1877, ideas incubated for half a decade coalesce into poems remarkable in their linguistic and metrical strangeness and in their palpable conviction of the essential goodness of creation. If created things are good, they are good in two ways: first, as creatures of the will and desire of a good God; and second, by extension, in their very specificity, their thingness. A creature, in the action of its particular creatureliness, reveals itself in its specificity, as both a created and a fallen thing, in the “unwashed condition” of its “being.”

But it also reveals something of the “common nature” of all created things, whose existence points to their shared Creator. Hopkins’s own term, inscape, refers to this dual revelation: the simultaneously individual and universal thisness, made manifest in both being and action, that is the true identity of every creature.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (Wikimedia Commons)

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire” is Hopkins’s verse manifesto articulating this notion of inscape, the philosophical impetus behind the great sonnets of that year. As each created thing enacts its particular thingness, “myself it speaks and spells.” At the same time, it also proclaims a single name: “Christ,” whose nature underwrites all other natures.

This analogical reality, simultaneously fully itself and fully a metaphor for its maker, announces itself in the poem’s opening phrase. Kingfishers don’t literally “catch fire” — this action itself is a metaphor for the brilliance of the bird’s feathers as the sunlight strikes them, presumably in the instant when the bird dives to strike at a fish. Levels of “striking” happen in that single phrase, none of them the literal striking as of a match. Yet the whole action is metaphorically incendiary, the phrase expressing it deeply true.

The poem moves from the clearly figurative in the first line — dragonflies occur as slightly diminished reflections of the preceding kingfishers — to more literal expressions of being-in-action: the ringing sound of rocks tumbled into wells, the peal of bell-tongues. In Hopkins’s cosmos, things appear most real in their visual and aural resonances, elusive and transitory even as they declare themselves.

The poem itself, in its very form — the Petrarchan sonnet, its sestet rhymed ccdcdc — becomes one more creature, asserting that it, too, is one of the “ten thousand places” where “Christ plays.” The sonnet both assumes and mutates, in meter and rhyme scheme, the received form, whose rules make it what it is. It proclaims itself as a sonnet, one of a common class of poem, yet also strikingly itself, distinct from any other sonnet in the tradition.

How “Christ plays” in the poem, meanwhile, is to arrest those same transitory actions and resonances, the fire-touched movements of kingfisher and dragonfly in the daylight, the ringing plunk of stones in water, the call of bells across the air, the ever-varied and ever-changing features of the human face, the sonnet itself. His “play” is to declare them, at once, wholly what they are, in their very mutability, and wholly — and immutably — who he is.

Maurice Pillard Verneuil, Kingfisher, Dragonflies, and Flowering Rushes, 1897 (Wikimedia Commons)

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