I first encountered the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins exactly thirty years ago, in an undergraduate English class, and although at the time I barely understood what I was reading, something about About his poems—like “The Windhover,” “God’s Grandeur,” and “Carrion Comfort”—resonated deeply with me, and it has stayed with me ever since. Along with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, he had much to do with my eventual conversion to Christianity and then my full reception into the Catholic Church, and I have had the pleasure of teaching his poetry to undergraduate and graduate students superior over the years. .
This is why I am particularly delighted to highlight As the Kingfishers Catch Fire: Selected and Annotated Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Selecting the poems in this volume, writing the introduction and above all annotating extensively each of the poems included therein was a great joy. Hopkins’s rich, evocative images carry an intensity of meaning that makes his poetry particularly well suited to conveying what Bishop Barron called the “oddity” of Christianity. To borrow Hopkins’ description in “Pied Beauty” of God’s creation, our faith encompasses “All things contrary, original, sober, strange; / Anything fickle, freckled (who knows how?).
The title of this book is taken from Hopkins’ great poem which opens with the line “As the kingfishers catch fire, the dragonflies draw the flame.” . .”, a sonnet that gives a vivid picture of what it means to have one’s identity in Christ.
Here is the poem as it appears in the volume, with its facing annotations:
![When kingfishers catch fire](https://www.wordonfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2304_Kingfishers_CS_banner-scaled.jpg)
“Kingfishers” is a deeply experiential poem. The byte (the first eight lines) and the seset (the next six lines) flow from start to finish with pauses but no periods; like water flowing downward, we move from one image to the next in sequence, finally stopping at the sestet’s opening phrase: “I say more.” Reading the poem aloud (go ahead, do it!) brings out its music.
Not only does the poem sound beautiful, but this music is associated with images of beauty. Kingfishers: brightly colored, fast-moving birds; dragonflies: elegant, jewel-toned insects whose name itself echoes the fantastical creatures of medieval mythology. The created world, created by God through Christ, is faithful to that for which it was created.
Then the poem moves on to human interaction with God’s creation: wells, evoking fresh water, but also mystery and magic (think tossing coins into a wishing well), and the playfulness of a child who throws a stone into a well just for fun. to hear the ringing of the falling stone. The swinging bell rings out the note with joyful exuberance, and here, with the image of the bell calling out his name, Hopkins subtly evokes the sacrament of baptism.
These lines draw us into an experience of pure, immediate joy, and then Hopkins tells us what that joy is, beginning with the clue given by the bell screaming its sound. name. “Every mortal thing does one thing and the same thing. . . me, he speaks and spells; / Cry What I do is me.“All things naturally express their own identity – and the opening lines of the poem helped us feel, deep in our bones, that this identity is joyful. Hopkins goes further: by following “what I do is me” We have “for that I came»: it takes us in one fell swoop from identity to goal.
We feel the joy of the kingfisher, the dragonfly, the stone, the bell, and the man each being exactly who they are meant to be. . .
After introducing the idea of purpose as the central point of the poem, Hopkins says, “I will say more,” declaring that he will reveal the meaning of it all.
However, he does not immediately name Christ; rather, he turns first to human experience, “the righteous judge”; making a verb from the noun justice, Hopkins makes concrete the link between identity and action. This righteous man “keeps grace: who keeps all his graces” – a play on words that emphasizes that God’s gift of grace is what allows man to see everything he does unfold in grace. The word “grace” helps the reader make the connection between joyful identity and Christ. Before Christ is named so that the evocation of Our Lord is understood not as an evangelizing addition, but as the piece that makes everything else fit together perfectly.
Because Hopkins shows Christ at the heart of everything. The righteous “acts in the eyes of God what he is in the eyes of God – / Christ”. Here we have a poetic resumption of the words of Saint Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2, 20). Hopkins ends the poem with words that express the joy of experiencing this identity: “for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Beautiful in the limbs, and fair in the eyes that are not his / To the father through the features faces of men. »
That “Kingfishers” is beautiful as a poem draws us deep into the heart of this experience: as a poet, Hopkins brings us to a lived moment of pure, joyful Christian identity. We feel the joy of the kingfisher, the dragonfly, the stone, the bell, and the man each being exactly who they are meant to be: rooted, anchored, graced in Christ.