🖋 🔔 WONDERFUL WORDS: As Kingfishers Catch Fire

Next Sunday (July 28th) is the birthday of one of the most innovative poets of the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1899), a name every homeschool literature student should know. In Hopkins’ honor, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this fourth week of July is one of his most widely read masterpieces: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”

Hopkins was a religious poet and he is famously difficult, but if you approach him with the right attitude — an almost scientific, puzzle-solving attitude — you’ll be richly rewarded. If your high-school homescholars can learn to decode Hopkins they’ll be more than ready for college-level work.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

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 What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Christ — 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.

Like Emily Dickinson in America, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Britain was seemingly born in the wrong century. The vast majority of his work, like Dickinson’s, was not published until some years after his death in 1899, and it was only after World War I that he came to be recognized as one of the great poets of the Victorian era.

Hopkins grew up in an exceptionally creative family, full of artists and illustrators and musicians and writers — a family that was also devoutly religious in the Anglican tradition. Gerard himself rejected his Anglican upbringing, eventually converting to Catholicism and becoming a Jesuit priest, which led to estrangement from his family.

Hopkins’ poetry is considered difficult because it bends English grammar and syntax almost to the breaking point. He likes to change nouns into verbs and he likes to coin new words to express abstract philosophical ideas.

Beginners sometimes think Hopkins’ writing sounds like a jumble, but in fact it’s just the opposite. In this week’s poem, before you even try to work out the meaning, look first at the intricate structure. Far from being chaotic, “Kingfishers” is actually a perfectly regular fourteen-line sonnet, one of the most tightly fitted of all poetic forms. More specifically, it’s what’s called a Petrarchan sonnet, divided into an eight-line octave that sets up a topic, and then a six-line sestet that resolves or concludes the topic. Semicolons and colons carefully mark the elements Hopkins is describing and comparing, and the rhyme-schemes of both the octave and the sestet are precise and show the break between the poem’s two sections: ABBA ABBA CDC DCD.

But what’s it about? You almost have to translate Hopkins into ordinary English first, to get the basic meaning, and then return to his original text to appreciate how the meaning plays out. This poem expresses an idea in Hopkins’ Christian theology: that human beings are made in Christ’s image. The octave sets up the idea by describing the lesser mortal things of this world — animals and inanimate objects — and how they all give voice to some inner essence that is distinctive of themselves. Here’s my prose “translation”:

Just as kingfishers “catch fire” (flash orange);
Just as dragonflies “draw flame” (glint iridescence);
Just as stones ring when they tumble into deep wells;
Just as the string on an instrument, when plucked, speaks its inner sound;
Just as a bell, when rung, rings out its inner tone;
Just so, all mortal things in the world express their inner (“indoor”) selves:
They shout, “this is what I am — to do this thing is why I exist.”

Then in typical sonnet fashion, Hopkins makes a turn (a volta) in the sestet: what about us? Do we also express our inner essence like all those lesser beings? We do. And what is that inner essence? For Hopkins the theologian, our inner essence is the image of Christ, the image in which we were created. Here’s my prose translation of the sestet:

But a man who is just does even more than these lesser beings:
He acts out justice in his life (Hopkins makes “justice” into a verb);
He enacts Christ’s grace in his life, and that is how God sees him;
Christ’s image is reflected (“plays”) in everything the just man does,
And what he does is beautiful to God,
Just as a child’s face is forever beautiful to its father.

Hopkins is a master of sound — his poems are meant not just to be read, but to be heard. Go back from my translation to the original text and listen to how he makes his words “speak” the things themselves in lines like “tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones ring” (you can almost hear the stone bouncing off the walls and echoing all the way down); or in “each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name” — the line itself almost vibrates like a giant bell. (How many “-ng” sounds can you count?)

Hopkins was not only a religious poet, but he was also quite a nature poet in many ways. If “Kingfishers” captures your imagination, fly over to “The Windhover” next, another Hopkins masterpiece that has captivated many a student’s heart.

What wonderful words and poetical productions are you and your students examining in your homeschool this Hercules Term? 😊

❡ This is a printable lesson: Down at the bottom of this post you’ll find a custom “Print” button that will let you create a neat and easy-to-read copy of this little lesson, and it will even let you resize or delete elements that you may not want or need (such as images or footnotes). Give it a try today! 🖨

❡ Upon your Easter bonnet: Can your students recognize a sonnet? It’s one of the most intricate forms used in traditional poetry, and we read four beautiful ones each year: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “May and the Poets,” “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” and “August.” For an excellent literary lesson, print all four of them out and have your students see what similarities and differences they can find. (Hint: fourteen lines is one of the main clues.) 📖

❡ As kingfishers catch fire: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our weekly poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life. 🔔

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Gerard Manley Hopkins) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. ✒️

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year, and add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week. 📫

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

❡ Support our work: If you enjoy our educational materials, please support us by starting your regular Amazon shopping from our very own homeschool teaching supplies page. When you click through from our page, any purchase you make earns us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for helping us to keep going and growing! 🛒

❡ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groups — local chapters that we call “Houses.” Our first at-large chapter, Headwaters House, is now forming and is open to homeschoolers everywhere. Find out how to become one of our founding members on the Headwaters House membership page. 🏡