As kingfishers catch fire...
2007-08-21 at 6:56 p.m.
One of the poets we're doing in 19th Century is Hopkins, and dr. ang gave us a brief look at one of his poems during our first lecture, and it's one of those poems that doen't seem to make much sense when you first look at it, but after reading through it, you feel a sense of vague understanding—vague because you don't precisely comprehend the poem, but at the same time, you get it at a sort of visceral, intuitive level. it's a beautiful poem, all the more so because it feels so unknowable.
I love the way sounds echo throughout the lines—no fixed rhyme scheme, but repetitious whispers resounding, repeating, almost hypnotic.
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 gráce: 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.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins