98 PA RT O N E
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,where each person and thing
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells.Light glinting off birds and insects, stones resounding down a well, tense violin
strings, a bell’s clapper, animate and so-called inanimate nature sing out their
names. Their animaor soul so seizes Hopkins he invents the verb “selve.”
Right here, in the idea of selving, his concerns unite: nature, divinity, poetry.
Each mortal thing’s singular vitality gives it divine charge. “There lives the dear-
est freshness deep down things.” That freshness, like poetry, speaks and spells
God. For the unique, indwelling design of a thing he coined the term inscape,
while the force sustaining an inscape and impressing it on us he called instress.
In other words, form and energy. And form and energy, fused “like shining from
shook foil,” means ecstasy: “kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.”
Call it sacred or profane, Hopkins craved ecstasy, what Lowell called his
“inebriating exuberance.” Poetry gave him a discipline for that, harnessing
energy, shaping rhythmic and verbal exuberance. “This morning I saw a hawk,”
we would say. “The Windhover” says,
I caught this morning morning’s minion, King-
dom of daylight ’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he wrung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!However these syncopations behave—“read it with the ears,” Hopkins hope-
fully said, “and my verse becomes all right”—the speaker’s ecstasy fuels the
hawk’s.
Ecstasy over a bird. Not surprisingly, Hopkins felt a lifelong closeness to
John Keats. “My grandfather was a surgeon, a fellow-student of Keats,” he
told Bridges, and recalled that his schoolmaster “would praise Keats by the
hour.” Hopkins prized “To Autumn” and held up Keats as one (like himself )
whose “beautiful works have been almost unknown and then have gained fame
at last.”
When trees near Keats’s house in Hampstead were threatened with cutting
down, Hopkins’s father published some protesting verse. Later, hurt by “the
decline of wild nature,” Hopkins writes a sonnet deploring Oxford ’s growth
into a manufacturing hub: “Thou hast a base and brackish skirt.... Thou hast