As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.
I couldn’t invoke poems fun to recite aloud like e.e. cummings i carry your heart without also invoking the wonderful Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’ve a special love of kingfishers after seeing them hovering over the streams of Tokyo with their beautiful coloration. Hopkins (1844–1889) was a Jesuit priest, English Catholic convert, and one of the most radical formal innovators in nineteenth-century English poetry. So much of Gerard Manley Hopkins work was all done posthumously, as Hopkins refused publication feeling that his priestly vocation came first. I find the ways he stretches language utterly beautiful, and respect so much his struggle with his vocation and his struggle with his sense of desolation (the opposite, as I’ve been taught by my dear friend Fr. David McCallum, the opposite of consolation).
He was working with two fascinating ideas - inscape and instress. Inscape was his word for the individuating essential pattern of any particular thing, what in the Buddhist term we might call “suchness”. What makes the kingfisher this kingfisher, the unrepeatable, unique being of each created thing, as Hopkins was reading the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus, and his concept of inscape draws on Scotus's haecceitas — the thisness of any individual being. The structural claim — that each thing enacts its being and that this enactment is sacred — is available across traditions. The Buddhist suchness (tathatā), the Sufi waḥdat al-wujūd, the Vedantic svadharma (one's own nature as one's path), the Daoist ziran (self-so-ing) — all are gesturing at what Hopkins names selving. Instress is the force that holds inscape in being and that allows it to be perceived. It is the energy of being-itself flowing through the particular form. When you see a kingfisher's blue flash and know yourself to be in the presence of this kingfisher, you have experienced instress.
