Poems for study » As Kingfishers Catch Fire » Themes in As Kingfishers Catch Fire
The Beauty, variety and uniqueness of Nature
See Henry Purcell and The Windhover.
Christ’s beauty
Christ’s beauty manifests itself through humanity, just as in Hurrahing in Harvest it manifests itself through the landscape. Beauty was a central concept of Duns Scotus’s philosophy, too, so the aesthetic poet is at one with the philosophical priest.
The grace of ordinary life
The mention of ‘keeping grace’ in l.10 is an ambiguous phrase:
- It could mean the normal religious phrase ‘(God’s) grace keep you.’
- Or that the upright person stays within the grace they have been given, i.e. humans are given grace to accomplish the telos or ultimate purpose of their lives
- ‘Grace’ is so called in Christian theology, because it is a gift not a right, nor is it particularly merited
- This grace ‘keeps all his goings graces’: i.e. everything a just person does will be ‘gracious’, or even ‘graceful’. People who encounter the just person will feel they have come in touch with God, as people are said to have felt when meeting Mother Teresa, for example.
- Do some research on the various meanings of the word ‘grace’.
- In what ways can Hopkins’ poems be said to have grace?
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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