As Kingfishers Catch Fire and the Image Disclosed in the Particular

The Argument

The Image Located in the Particular, Not Argued Toward It

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" moves from the specific behavior of birds and bells – each thing "does one thing and the same," acting out its own inscape simply by being what it is – to a closing claim about human beings: "Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his." The poem does not argue toward the image of God as a conclusion reached through reasoning. It locates the image already present in the specific, observable particulars of created things, discoverable through attention rather than through argument.

This gives Hopkins's poem a distinct relationship to the archive's account of human dignity compared with Gregory of Nyssa's epektasis, examined elsewhere in this archive. Gregory locates worth in an ongoing capacity for growth toward an infinite God; Hopkins locates it already fully present in each specific, finite instance – a given limb, a given pair of eyes – without requiring the growth Gregory's doctrine depends on. The two accounts complement rather than compete: one addresses worth as static and already complete in the particular, the other as dynamic and unfolding toward the infinite.

Read against the Genesis argument, Hopkins's poem supplies the clearest positive literary statement in this archive of the imago Dei located directly in ordinary physical particulars rather than argued for as doctrine or staged as a narrative of fall and covering – the archive's case studies in fall and substitution find their counterpart here in a poem built entirely around presence rather than loss.

Supporting Text

The Poem's Closing Lines