The Fire of Christ
“Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire
that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my
chevalier!”[15]”
But, when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan
of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness. -
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
===========================
*“The truth is
ultimately an act of love.”* ~Bd. John
Paul II, Fides et Ratio
Introduction to the ‘Living Flame of Love’…
Most probably John introduced these
variations into the text while at La
Peñuela in the last months of his life, August-September 1591. A witness
who lived with him at La Peñuela told of how in the early morning John used to
withdraw into the garden for prayer and remain there until, coaxed by the heat
of the sun, he returned to his monastery cell where he spent his time writing
on certain stanzas of poetry. By this date all his other works, including the
Canticle, had reached their final stage. Moreover John brought a copy of the
work with him to Ubeda. He gave it as a gift in gratitude to Ambrosio de
Villareal, the doctor who had cared for him there. What must have been the
doctor's thoughts as he read of "how
much God exalts the soul that pleases him"?
========================
‘As Kingfishers…’
Abstraction is the enemy of poetry
and Hopkins did not need reminding
of this: despite the essentially intellectual nature of his theme, there is not
a single abstract noun in 'As Kingfishers...'. Hopkins,
in full energy, makes the experience present rather than talking about it; and
it is good to be there. Desmond Egan analyses this great Hopkins
poem line by line, word by word.
Norman MacKenzie dates the sonnet to March or April of 1877 during the time Hopkins was in St. Beuno's and wrote nine sonnets in pastoral Wales. (These included 'God's Grandeur' 'The Starlight Night', 'In the Valley of the Elwy', 'The Windhover' and 'Hurrahing in Harvest' - all of which he dated; and 'For Spring' , 'The Caged Skylark' 'As Kingfishers..' and 'The Lantern out of Doors', which he did not). Surely a'wonder-year' - in MacKenzie's words and one which poet Paul Mariani, in his Commentary has described convincingly as one of growing metrical complexity: Hopkins at the height of his powers - or close to it.
Hopkins was was 33 years old. We are dealing here with a completed work of art. The imagery of the poem has a corresponding coherence - and is often, perhaps, not fully understood.
First of all, here is the text of the poem.
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 speak 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 play in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
It starts with a confident assumption: the simile of the first line is based on a comparison of succeeding metaphors: the lightning flight of the kingfisher seems to turn him into a firebolt; the sudden dart of a dragonfly draws (or attracts) a brilliance comparable to that of a fierce blue flame (MacKenzie refers to the blast of a blowpipe)…
MacKenzie suggests another meaning: that the sound tells of the creator - but it seems to me unnecessary to anticipate Hopkins's thesis - particularly when he is dealing with the natural and the inanimate insofar as each is uniquely itself, before he moves onto another level of significance. He is not quite ready to do that yet, until the bell comparison is made. This image includes an example of Hopkins's excited use of a technical term (I think of Shakespeare's 'know a hawk from a handsaw'. a hawk being a large trowel for cement; of Emily Dickenson's 'valves' of attention, referring to the valves or half-doors; or of Hopkins's own 'rung on the rein' in "The Windhover' of the same year where 'ring' means 'to rise spirally'. Poets enjoy such precise, technical words). 'Bow' means the sound-bow of a bell - the lower part, where the hammer strikes and where the note finds its greatest amplification. So: every hanging bell, whenstruck, throws out ('broad' is an adverb meaning 'abroad') its special sound or 'name'…
Norman MacKenzie dates the sonnet to March or April of 1877 during the time Hopkins was in St. Beuno's and wrote nine sonnets in pastoral Wales. (These included 'God's Grandeur' 'The Starlight Night', 'In the Valley of the Elwy', 'The Windhover' and 'Hurrahing in Harvest' - all of which he dated; and 'For Spring' , 'The Caged Skylark' 'As Kingfishers..' and 'The Lantern out of Doors', which he did not). Surely a'wonder-year' - in MacKenzie's words and one which poet Paul Mariani, in his Commentary has described convincingly as one of growing metrical complexity: Hopkins at the height of his powers - or close to it.
Hopkins was was 33 years old. We are dealing here with a completed work of art. The imagery of the poem has a corresponding coherence - and is often, perhaps, not fully understood.
First of all, here is the text of the poem.
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 speak 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 play in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
It starts with a confident assumption: the simile of the first line is based on a comparison of succeeding metaphors: the lightning flight of the kingfisher seems to turn him into a firebolt; the sudden dart of a dragonfly draws (or attracts) a brilliance comparable to that of a fierce blue flame (MacKenzie refers to the blast of a blowpipe)…
MacKenzie suggests another meaning: that the sound tells of the creator - but it seems to me unnecessary to anticipate Hopkins's thesis - particularly when he is dealing with the natural and the inanimate insofar as each is uniquely itself, before he moves onto another level of significance. He is not quite ready to do that yet, until the bell comparison is made. This image includes an example of Hopkins's excited use of a technical term (I think of Shakespeare's 'know a hawk from a handsaw'. a hawk being a large trowel for cement; of Emily Dickenson's 'valves' of attention, referring to the valves or half-doors; or of Hopkins's own 'rung on the rein' in "The Windhover' of the same year where 'ring' means 'to rise spirally'. Poets enjoy such precise, technical words). 'Bow' means the sound-bow of a bell - the lower part, where the hammer strikes and where the note finds its greatest amplification. So: every hanging bell, whenstruck, throws out ('broad' is an adverb meaning 'abroad') its special sound or 'name'…
The movement in 'As Kingfishers..' so far, has been from nature, animate and
inanimate, to what is man-made: from kingfisher, dragonfly and stone to string
and bell… Each human, every created, and therefore 'mortal' thing also has one
distinctive, defining function: a single raison d'etre, of which the earlier
imagery provides reminders. It is interesting to see that Hopkins
reaches for another metaphor to put words on this: 'being indoors each one
dwells'.The metaphor, 'dwelling indoors', living inside oneself, can only
apply to the human and not to kingfisher or stone or the like…
The image of Christ's 'playing', in line 11 of 'As Kingfishers...'
may owe something - as MacKenzie suggests - to St. Paul's expression: It is
no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2 19-20) Zo
de ouketi ego, Ze(i) de en emoi Xhristos.
… In one of his short Commentaries on the Spiritual Exercises
of St. Ignatius ('Contemplatio ad Obtinendum Amorem') written circa 1881,
we read, All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and
if we know how to touch them (,) give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and
flow, ring and tell of him. (House ed. p.342).
… he invokes the concrete rather than any abstraction: the instinct of a genuine poet. In this regard, some lines from a recent Collection, The World Returning, by contemporary English poet Lawrence Sail are worth quoting:
As when you gingerly open prayerful hands to see what you have caught, that has been tickling your palms with wings or feelers, and you find only the thought of something bright and precise, that must have somehow zig-zagged back to the sky, its image too soon blurred to an idea. (Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, UK, 2002)
How easily a fresh moment or feeling can be lost in words that slide back from life towards the 'idea'.
… the word, meaning 'it is likely (that)'. If we understand the word in this way in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, the meaning is 'it is likely that /in the same way, each tucked string tells ...'
… he invokes the concrete rather than any abstraction: the instinct of a genuine poet. In this regard, some lines from a recent Collection, The World Returning, by contemporary English poet Lawrence Sail are worth quoting:
As when you gingerly open prayerful hands to see what you have caught, that has been tickling your palms with wings or feelers, and you find only the thought of something bright and precise, that must have somehow zig-zagged back to the sky, its image too soon blurred to an idea. (Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, UK, 2002)
How easily a fresh moment or feeling can be lost in words that slide back from life towards the 'idea'.
… the word, meaning 'it is likely (that)'. If we understand the word in this way in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, the meaning is 'it is likely that /in the same way, each tucked string tells ...'
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~ Desmond Egan ,'As
Kingfishers Catch Fire'. . . analysis of Imagery
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