The Full Text of “As kingfishers catch fire”
1As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
2As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
3Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
4Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
5Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
6Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
7Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
8Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
9I say more: the just man justices;
10Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
11Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
12Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
13Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
14To the Father through the features of men's faces.
The Full Text of “As kingfishers catch fire”
1As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
2As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
3Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
4Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
5Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
6Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
7Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
8Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
9I say more: the just man justices;
10Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
11Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
12Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
13Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
14To the Father through the features of men's faces.
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“As kingfishers catch fire” Introduction
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Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote "As kingfishers catch fire" in 1877, the year that he was ordained as a Catholic priest. This innovative sonnet expresses Hopkins's joy in his faith through his joy in the beauty of the world. Every "mortal thing" (or living thing), this poem suggests, does "one thing and the same": it embodies its own distinct, one-of-a-kind identity. But paradoxically, to live out one's unique identity is also to share in the life of Christ, who (in Hopkins's view) lives in everyone. Like nearly all of Hopkins's verse, "As kingfishers catch fire" wouldn't be published until many years after Hopkins's 1889 death. His friend Robert Bridges salvaged it (among other poems of Hopkins's) and published it in the 1918 collection Poems.
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“As kingfishers catch fire” Summary
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Just as kingfishers seem to light on fire, and just as dragonflies seem to pull a trail of flame after them; just as stones falling over the rims of round wells ring out; just as each plucked string of an instrument sings out; just as each hanging bell, when swung, finds the voice to cry out its own name, far and wide; every living creature does just the same thing, acting out what's inside itself. It becomes itself; it behaves like itself; it says "myself" through its existence, shouting: My actions are what I am, and that's what I'm here for.
And I'll say more than that: the just man acts justly. If he responds to God's grace, then all his acts will be part of that grace. He behaves, under the eye of God, like what God sees that he is: Christ. For Christ plays his part in ten thousand different places. He reveals himself, beautifully, in bodies and eyes other than his own, to God the Father through humanity's many faces.
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“As kingfishers catch fire” Themes
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Identity, Selfhood, and God
In "As kingfishers catch fire," the passionately Christian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins describes a beautiful, paradoxical relationship between God and God's creatures. Everything in the world, this poem suggests, has its own distinct selfhood, an identity that its whole being expresses (a quality that Hopkins called "inscape" in other writings). But that one-of-a-kind selfhood is also part of a shared divinity. For, as the speaker declares, Christ lives in everyone, expressing himself differently in "ten thousand places." In this poem, to be a "mortal thing," a living creature, is to be at once a unique self and an embodiment of God.
Hopkins begins the poem with vivid images taken from the natural world and from music. He describes iridescent "kingfishers" (brilliant blue diving birds) and "dragonflies" seeming to "catch fire" as they fly; the satisfying sounds of "stones" dropped into "roundy wells"; the "tucked" (or plucked) strings of musical instruments ringing out; churchbells tolling. Each of these things, he says, "does one thing and the same": it expresses its identity through its very being. Every instant of its existence seems to cry out: "What I do is me: for that I came." In other words, each of these things fulfills its purpose by being distinctly itself—itself and none other.
But for human beings, the poem goes on, all those distinct selfhoods are animated by one central force: Christ. "[I]n God's eye," as Hopkins puts it, every person is an embodiment of Jesus, the second person in the Christian Trinity (in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct persons of one God). Christ, the poem says, "plays in ten thousand places," acting out each human life as if it were a role in a play.
In this vision, God gives everyone both a distinct, unique identity and a shared identity. All people have a separate, one-of-a-kind selfhood. But all people also have a shared identity as an embodiment of Christ. To Hopkins, this paradoxical relationship is inherently "lovely": all life expresses a joyful uniqueness and a joyful togetherness at once.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “As kingfishers catch fire”
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Lines 1-3
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring;In "As kingfishers catch fire," Gerard Manley Hopkins revels in the inherent identity of everything in the world, the quality that makes things what they are. A useful word for this idea is one Hopkins coined himself: "inscape," the inimitable identity of each individual thing. This is a poem all about the beauty—and the divinity—of the inscape.
The poem begins with bright, quick images snatched out of the air:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
Kingfishers and dragonflies are colorful creatures. The kingfishers Hopkins would have known are a stunning electric blue with vermilion bellies and jaunty white neckerchiefs. Dragonflies can be green, red, blue, golden, orange—and all with shimmery, iridescent wings.
In this image, the kingfisher's brilliant colors metaphorically "catch fire," burning through the air. Perhaps they also "catch fire" in the sense that their iridescent feathers capture fire, reflecting the light of the sun. The dragonflies, meanwhile, "draw flame" behind them as if they were comets, leaving streaks of color in their wake as they blur past. And there's a potential double meaning here, too: the dragonflies might "draw flame" in the sense that they seem to attract sunlight down from the sky.
The kingfishers and dragonflies seem to burn with their own fire. But they also contain and express a greater light. That idea, subtly and glancingly raised here, will become one of the most important in the poem. Keep an eye out for it later on.
Though they're fiery in their brilliance, kingfishers and dragonflies are water creatures, animals you might see darting over a pond in the summertime. The poem's world remains watery in its next lines, which add a layer of sound imagery to the bright sight of the birds and bugs. Hopkins now conjures up the sound of stones "tumbled over rim in roundy wells"—that is, pebbles dropped into round wells.
The word "tumbled," with its smooth vowel sounds and round consonants, itself has a pebbly quality. It also precisely captures the way that something small and dense falls, rolling over itself in the air.
This round word meets its match in the "roundy wells" the stone falls into. The word "round" is already an adjective, of course; Hopkins doesn't need to add the "-y" suffix there (as, say, one might add a "-y" to something that's inclined to get "stuck" and call it "sticky"). He chooses "roundy" just for the joy of the sound, relishing the well's roundness. A "roundy" well feels rounder by far than a merely "round" well.
Tumbled into the roundy well, "stones ring," Hopkins concludes, choosing a brighter, sharper word for contrast—and thus capturing the music of a pebble pinging off the wall of a well, before the final plash.
Robust alliteration, assonance, and consonance help to bring this scene to life:
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; [...]These interweaving /l/, /oh/, /ih/, and /r/ sounds are just plain euphonious. Their beauty helps to evoke, not just the sound of tumbling a pebble into a well, but the satisfaction.
The glory of the sounds and sights in these first lines also captures the glory of a certain kind of calm summer day: the sort where a person wanders around tossing pebbles into wells, or sits for a while to watch the kingfishers swoop by. The excitement and pleasure in these first lines comes to the speaker through a watchful peace.
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Lines 3-4
like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; -
Lines 5-6
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; -
Lines 7-8
Selves—goes itself;
myself
it speaks and spells,
Crying
What I do is me: for that I came. -
Lines 9-10
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; -
Lines 11-12
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Chríst. -
Lines 12-14
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.
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“As kingfishers catch fire” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
The first five lines of the poem form one elaborate simile. By starting the poem with a complex, multifaceted comparison between quite different things, Hopkins builds an idea of paradoxical similarity-within-difference right into the poem's shape.
The poem's first word announces that Hopkins is building up to a simile:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
At first, readers might think this line is a complete thought, a simile unto itself. Hopkins might simply seem to be comparing kingfishers to dragonflies, noting that they both blaze with fiery color in the sunlight.
But then, more comparisons arise. Watch how Hopkins's simile layers as the first stanza develops:
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:The second "as" here suggests that there's a likeness, not just between the kingfishers and the dragonflies, but between these creatures and the tumbled pebbles. Then the "like" in line 3 adds yet another layer of comparison, suggesting that plucked strings and swung bells are also somehow connected to the birds, the bugs, and the stones.
It's only in line 5 that the ultimate subject of all these comparisons arrives at last. All these different things are like "each mortal thing," the simile concludes. Paradoxically, every single living thing in the world does "one thing and the same" by expressing its unique, distinct identity.
This long simile manages to suggest that each of these things is alike in being completely individual. Hopkins here shapes his figurative language to mirror the idea at the poem's heart.
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Metaphor
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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"As kingfishers catch fire" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Draw flame
- Roundy
- Tucked
- Bow
- Finds tongue
- Fling
- Broad
- Mortal
- Deals out that being indoors each one dwells
- Selves
- Just
- Justices
- Grace
- All his goings
- Limbs
- The Father
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That is, dragonflies seem to pull a tail of fire after them as they fly, like comets.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “As kingfishers catch fire”
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Form
"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" riffs on the form of an Italian sonnet. Like such a sonnet, the poem is:
- 14 lines long,
- divided into an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet,
- and rhymed ABBA ABBA CDCDCD.
The difference comes in the meter. Rather than sticking to the traditional iambic pentameter (a line of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in line 2's "As tum- | bled o- | ver rim | in round- | y wells"), Hopkins writes in his characteristic sprung rhythm.
"Sprung rhythm" was Hopkins's term for a naturalistic accentual meter that was meant to capture the rhythms of ordinary speech. (Readers can find more details on sprung rhythm in the Meter section of this guide.) Fittingly enough for a poem about each living thing's God-given "inscape"—its particular and unique selfhood, that is—sprung rhythm gives Hopkins's verse its identity. Nobody else sounds quite like Hopkins, and here as elsewhere, he uses his inimitable voice with gusto.
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Meter
"As kingfishers catch fire" is written in sprung rhythm—a meter that Hopkins invented himself. Sprung rhythm is a kind of accentual verse, a meter in which the lines don't stick to any one metrical foot (like the iamb or the trochee), but instead get measured out by a particular number of beats.
In Hopkins's sprung rhythm, the number of stresses per line isn't even always consistent. Some of this poem's lines use five strong stresses, some use six, and some—like line 3—use even more:
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Almost every word in this line gets a stress!
Such variations produce an exuberant rhythm, more organic than traditional meters, capturing the varied rise and fall of ordinary speech. Some critics see sprung rhythm as a precursor of free verse, which would start becoming popular not long after Hopkins's poems were first published in 1918 (years after Hopkins's untimely death).
While sprung rhythm is typically pretty self-explanatory, Hopkins marks some words in the poem with accents (like the ones over the words "gráce: thát" in line 10) so that readers will know where some of his more surprising stresses fall. Here's how lines 9-10 would scan, just for example:
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;The long runs of stresses here are a characteristic feature of sprung rhythm, helping to give this meter its passion and energy. (Readers might note that even the term "sprung rhythm" has an inherent springiness.)
There's yet more going on in this particular poem's meter. Hopkins is playing with the sonnet form here, so he sometimes briefly dips into iambic pentameter—the traditional meter of the sonnet. Poems written in iambic pentameter use lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. One nice example appears in line 2:
As tum- | bled o- | ver rim | in round- | y wells
These moments of more regular meter (which also appear in lines 5-6) gracefully nod to the sonnet tradition, giving Hopkins a sort of metrical trellis over which he can grow the wild vines of his sprung rhythm.
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Rhyme Scheme
This poem uses the traditional rhyme scheme of a sonnet—an Italian sonnet, to be precise. Italian sonnets start with an octave (or eight-line stanza) rhymed like this:
ABBA ABBA
They conclude with a sestet (a six-line stanza) using one of many possible combinations of C, D, and E rhymes. Hopkins chooses this one:
CDCDCD
It's partly through this rhyme scheme that readers can tell Hopkins is riffing on the sonnet form in this poem. The elegant, traditional pattern of the rhymes plays against the poem's freewheeling rhythm.
Hopkins gives the poem's sounds even more juice and relish through copious internal rhyme. Listen, for instance, to the interweaving rhyme words in lines 3-4:
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;These internal rhymes create a ringing, echoing pattern that suits the final image in this passage: a tolling bell, with each of its swings creating a paired ding-dong.
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“As kingfishers catch fire” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a watchful, deep-feeling observer with a profound Christian faith. In all of these qualities, the speaker might reasonably be read as a voice for Hopkins himself. Hopkins converted to Catholicism as a young man, and he became a Jesuit priest in the year that he wrote this poem. This speaker's sense that every living person embodies Christ reflects Hopkins's own beliefs.
But this speaker's vision of a God that lives throughout all the world also owes something to the earlier English Romantic poets, who wrote around the turn of the 19th century. Like those poets, this speaker perceives a kind of God-given life in nature as well as in people. Here, a falling stone, a "roundy well[]", a tolling bell, and a blazing kingfisher all express something of the divine by being exactly what they are and doing exactly what they do. In just the same way, a "just man" embodies "what in God's eye he is— / Christ."
This poem's rapturous language suggests that the speaker draws immense delight from the world being what it is. The speaker's connection with Christ—felt as a kinship with all the world as well as a relishing of each living thing's distinct identity—offers them joy. And that joy is accessible even through the most daily experiences. This speaker need only drop a pebble into a well to be reminded of their intimate relationship with a loving God.
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“As kingfishers catch fire” Setting
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"As kingfishers catch fire" has no explicit setting. But through its imagery, readers can catch flashes of Hopkins's own world: the green landscapes of the British countryside. (He wrote the poem while he was studying for the priesthood in rural Wales, a place he came to love deeply.) His mention of kingfishers and dragonflies suggests a riverside summer, where those bright fishing birds and jeweled bugs swoop in the sunlight, seeming to "catch fire" as they go.
In a broader sense, though, the poem is set in the whole world. This is a poem about identity and essence, and its big idea is that God "plays in ten thousand places," appearing everywhere a human being does. God gives "each mortal thing" (everything alive) its selfhood. Wherever life is, Hopkins declares, one may see the face of the divine.
That the poem's images seen drawn from a familiar, homey landscape of church bells and kingfishers only supports that idea. Christ's face, Hopkins suggests, is visible outside whatever window one cares to look through.
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Literary and Historical Context of “As kingfishers catch fire”
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Literary Context
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a poet of deep and ecstatic faith. Born into a staunch Anglican family, he converted to Roman Catholicism as an Oxford undergraduate. Much to his parents' horror, he later became a Jesuit priest. Though he'd always loved writing poetry, Hopkins burned many of his early works when he joined the novitiate (that is, became a priest-in-training), feeling that he should turn away from art to devote himself fully to God. His superiors, however, wisely encouraged him to see his poetry as a means of worship, and he returned to writing as a theology student in the 1870s. The resultant body of sensuous, poignant poetry reflects Hopkins's fervent belief that God suffuses everything.
In some ways, Hopkins was a poet of his time. He shares a painful nostalgia for a pre-industrial England with other Victorian writers—for example, Christina Rossetti (whom Hopkins befriended), Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens.
But in other ways, Hopkins's poetry anticipates the future and connects to the deeper past:
- Hopkins's innovative style, with its freewheeling sprung rhythm and its richly interwoven sounds, is often seen as a precursor of the modernist free verse that would arise in the early 20th century.
- His exhortations to preserve and celebrate "the weeds and the wilderness" (and his laments for felled trees) also look forward to contemporary ecopoetry, which likewise honors and mourns a natural world marred by human greed.
- Meanwhile, his fervent, religious love of nature hearkens back to the pantheistic Romantics of the early 19th century (like William Wordsworth) and the passionately Christian Metaphysical poets of the 17th century (like George Herbert).
Perhaps critics are particularly inclined to think of Hopkins as a proto-modernist because the bulk of his work wasn't published until 1918, when Hopkins's friend (and fellow poet) Robert Bridges released the posthumous collection Poems (in which "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" first appeared). This book would deeply influence writers in the 20th century and beyond, from W.H. Auden to Dylan Thomas to T.S. Eliot.
Historical Context
Hopkins wrote "As kingfishers catch fire" in 1877, the year he completed his studies at St. Beuno's College in Wales and was ordained as a Catholic priest. This was a hard-won accomplishment for a man of his time and background.
During the Victorian era—that is, the reign of Queen Victoria, who ruled the British Empire from 1837 to 1901—British Catholics were just beginning to emerge from beneath a cloud of suspicion and oppression. Since the 16th-century reign of Elizabeth I, the Church of England (or Anglican church), a branch of Protestant Christianity founded by Elizabeth's father Henry VIII, maintained a hard-fought dominance over Great Britain as the state religion. Catholics, bloodily persecuted under Elizabeth, were eventually tolerated—barely. But Anglicans continued to see Catholics as a dangerous, subversive, suspiciously European element in British society, loyal to Pope over monarch. Catholics were consequently not granted full civil rights until 1829.
But by the time Hopkins converted to Catholicism in 1866, he was one of a swelling crowd. Catholicism gradually gained strength and momentum in Britain over the course of the 19th century, fed in part by groups like the Oxford Movement (which, in its attempts to restore Catholic traditions to Anglicanism, ironically produced a slew of conversions to straight-ahead Catholicism). Nonetheless, Catholicism was still not quite proper in the eyes of many Victorian Christians—including, alas, Hopkins's family. A respectable crew of devout Anglicans, stout members of the British establishment, Hopkins's people were appalled by the young scholar's turn to a suspect, "foreign" religion.
Hopkins, however, felt he had a vocation to the Catholic priesthood that he could not ignore, even at the cost of a rift in his close-knit family. His fervent faith pours out in his poetry, and particularly in his (not-altogether-orthodox) belief that God imbues the whole natural world.
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More “As kingfishers catch fire” Resources
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External Resources
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A Hopkins Chronology — Read a timeline of Hopkins's short life.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Read a biography of Hopkins from the Poetry Foundation.
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Hopkins's Legacy — Visit a website dedicated to Hopkins's life and work to find information on recent Hopkins scholarship.
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Portraits of Hopkins — See some images of the melancholy, sweet-faced Hopkins.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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