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Poems for study » As Kingfishers Catch Fire » Synopsis of As Kingfishers Catch Fire

Composition

Although this petrarchan sonnet is undated, it is included just after Inversnaid (September 1881), so was probably written while Hopkins was back at Roehampton to complete his novitiate. It also has a philosophical perspective which suggests a period of quiet after parish duties. He turns back to the form of his earlier sonnets, rather than continuing to work with the expanded form he was developing in Felix Randal.

Dramatic yet restrained

Compared to many of the earlier sonnets, the poem is concise and restrained: for example, there are only two run-on lines, and most lines have a recognisable pentameter form without the reader having to take notice of outriders and other devices of sprung rhythm. Yet the poem manages both to say a great deal, and to contain within itself some lovely turns of phrase and some striking thoughts. Its subject matter is philosophical, yet its expression is very natural. Hopkins the poet manages to put into striking, even dramatic, verse what Hopkins the priest holds as theological truth, based on his reading of the medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus.

In the style of Petrarch, an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, who created both a form of the sonnet and presented a courtly ideal of womanhood.
A sonnet is a poem with a special structure. It has fourteen lines, which are organised in a particular manner, usually characterised by the pattern of rhyming, which changes as the ideas in the poem evolve.
Area with its own church, served by a priest who has the spiritual care of all those living within it.
A line containing five stressed syllables or feet.
A term coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins to denote a syllable or group of syllables not to be counted in the scansion. Also called hangers.
A term given by Gerard Manley Hopkins to his versification. It does have a regular basic metre, but contains additional feet or outriders and other planned irregularities.
A person whose role is to carry out religious functions.
Related to theology, the study of God.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
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 do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps 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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