As Kingfishers Catch Fire

Gerard Manley Hopkins · Leaving Cert Poetry

As kingfishers catch fire is a fourteen line sonnet that Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1877, and it makes one claim throughout: everything that exists says what it is by doing the one thing only it can do. The octave gathers evidence from birds, stones, strings and bells; the sestet turns that law on people, and finishes with Christ visible in an ordinary human face.

As kingfishers catch fire by Hopkins: a law proved in the octave, applied in the sestet

Hopkins wrote this while training as a Jesuit, under the influence of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. Scotus’s term haecceitas means the thisness of a thing, whatever makes one bird that kingfisher and not just a kingfisher. From it Hopkins built two words of his own: inscape, a thing’s individual design, and instress, the energy by which that design is felt and given out. You can pass without the vocabulary, not without the idea. The form carries it too: a Petrarchan sonnet gives eight lines of evidence, a turn at line 9, and six applying the finding to people.

How the sonnet builds its case, line by line

Octave · Lines 1 to 4

A kingfisher in flight looks like fire catching; a dragonfly seems to pull a flame of colour behind it. In lines 2 to 4 Hopkins swaps sight for sound: stones ring when tumbled over the rim of a round well, a tightened string speaks its note, a swung bell’s clapper finds a tongue and flings out its own name. The bell is not making a noise, it is saying what it is called: personification with a job to do. The alliteration of tucked, tells, hung and swung chimes while it describes chiming.

• “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;”Both images are natural fire caught in flight, so the idea of a thing lit from inside starts as plain observation. Use it to open an answer on inscape.

Octave · Lines 5 to 8

Line 5 is the hinge, and the colon at its end is the pivot: five lines of image on one side, the law they prove on the other. Line 6 says each thing deals out the being that lives inside it, and deals out matters, because identity becomes something given away rather than quietly owned. Line 7 is the one to notice. Hopkins uses the noun self as a verb, selves, so being yourself is an action you perform, not a fact you sit inside. Line 8 closes the octave on a purpose: what I do is me.

• “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:”The governing law, stated flat, in even monosyllables that slow the line to the pace of a definition. The best quotation for your opening paragraph.
• “Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.”Hopkins marks the stress on Whát himself, pushing the weight onto the identity of the action. Use it to close the natural world half of the argument.

Sestet · Lines 9 to 14

The volta at line 9 is an escalation, not a change of subject: I say more. Hopkins applies the law he proved on bells to a person, inventing another verb, justices, so the just man does justice the way a bell rings. Line 10 extends it to grace, so that keeping grace makes every action gracious. Line 11 finds what a man does and what he is identical when God looks. Line 12 then drops one word into its own sentence, Christ, and plays echoes the deals out of the octave.

• “Í say móre: the just man justices;”Your quotation for the volta and the move from instinct to moral choice. The printed accents make it sound spoken, like someone correcting you mid argument.
• “Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,”One word, isolated as a sentence by the line break, carrying the weight of the whole poem. Take it for any question on Hopkins’s God, present everywhere at once.
• “To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”Lines 13 to 14 put Christ in other people’s bodies and eyes, not his own. Father, features and faces thread the closing line with soft alliteration.

The ideas the poem keeps returning to

• Identity is something you do. Across lines 1 to 8 nothing has an identity sitting still. The kingfisher catches fire in flight, the string speaks when plucked, the bell names itself when swung. Selfhood appears only in action, which is why line 7 needs a verb.
• Grace shows up in what a person does. Lines 9 and 10 refuse to separate being good from acting well: the just man justices, and keeping grace makes his goings gracious. Holiness here is behaviour that can be watched.
• Christ keeps happening through other people. Lines 9 to 14 make one claim: when a person acts as what God sees them to be, that action is Christ, multiplied outward into ten thousand places and into bodies that are not Christ’s own.

Sound and image

Hopkins writes the sonnet in sprung rhythm, his own metrical system, which is worth naming once and then leaving alone. The accent marks matter more, because they are his and they tell you where to lean: the stresses on dráw fláme in line 1 force a heavy reading of a flash of light, and the mark on Whát in line 8 throws the weight onto the action rather than the speaker. The images run in chains: sight, then sound, then a human face.

The voice you hear

It starts as admiring observation, someone genuinely delighted by a bird catching the light. As the list lengthens the voice gains confidence, until line 5 states the law with the calm of a man reading out a definition. From line 9 the tone is assured and close to incantation, and by line 12 it is reverent, almost triumphant. The poem never admits a doubt, and that certainty is worth a sentence in your answer.

Taking as kingfishers catch fire into the exam

The reliable thesis is that being fully and distinctively yourself is, in this poem, an act of praise. Build it from the octave and let the sestet complete it, because the structure is your evidence: particular to universal, natural to human. For comparison, Pied Beauty finds God in individuating particularity, The Windhover makes one creature’s action a revelation of Christ, and God’s Grandeur diffuses the divine through everything. Develop one pairing rather than listing three.

Where marks are lost

Questions to test yourself

• Does the idea that simply being yourself glorifies God feel liberating to you, or does it load an impossible weight onto ordinary selfhood?
• The octave describes instinctive behaviour and the sestet describes chosen moral action. Does the poem earn that leap?
• Which single line would you use to state the poem’s argument in an opening paragraph, and why that one?
• How do Hopkins’s two coined verbs, in lines 7 and 9, do work that ordinary words could not?
• Why does a poem this abstract end on a human face rather than on God?

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