Hopkins, Inscape, and the Vindication of Nature

(Written 2008)

Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems "Pied Beauty" and "[As Kingfishers Catch Fire...]" both employ extensive natural imagery in hymns of praise to nature and to nature's God. In each we see something of Hopkins's concept of an inscape, the quality of a thing that makes it uniquely itself and nothing else (Everett). The images of physical things Hopkins evokes serve for him as reminders of the spiritual glory of the God who made them and endowed each with its particular individuality.

In terms of construction, [As Kingfishers Catch Fire...] is a sonnet consisting of an octave (two quatrains, ABBA–ABBA, using the same rhymes) and a sestet (CDCDCD form). The first quatrain catalogues five objects that, in doing what they do, distinctly define themselves. Each is accompanied by an active verb and intense, sensuous imagery. The second quatrain delves into Hopkins's notion of inscape, the revelatory "oneness" of a thing, the unique attributes that, combined, define an object (Everett). Each and every thing Hopkins observes—be it a bird or an insect or a stone thrown down a well—is uniquely itself, with its very own "being indoors" (6), or essence. What's more, each thing proclaims both this essence and the fact that it exists simply to embody it: "myself it speaks and spells, / crying Whát I do is me: for that I came" (7-8). In the sestet that makes up the second stanza Hopkins extends the quality of inscape to men, but here it is something more than merely the self-ness of an individual. A just man may justice—Hopkins uses it as a verb—but he also "keeps grace" (10) and is therefore kept in grace by God. Through this grace, the inscape of a just man is not only that of his unique self but also, "in God’s eye" (11), that of Christ, who therefore "plays in ten thousand places" (12). Paradoxically, multitudes of just men somehow share the same inscape, embodying both themselves and Christ in a mysterious universality. [1]

"Pied Beauty" is a so-called "curtal sonnet", an altered form of the Petrarchan sonnet, invented by Hopkins. Whereas the full-size sonnet has an octet and a sestet, this curtal sonnet has the same proportions on a smaller scale: a sestet followed by a quatrain with a half-line "tail" (Pitchford). Though he could have easily used more varied rhymes and still had a sonnet, Hopkins chooses to use fewer, forging a unity between the sestet and quatrain/tail: the rhyme scheme is ABCABC DBCDC. In the poem we see the same celebration of the inscapes of things, of animals and even of inanimate objects. Hopkins's primary images for most of the poem are those of colors and textures, for he tells us that God's glory is evident in something as simple as the contrast of two colors. As in [As Kingfishers Catch Fire...], the first stanza—or what would be the first stanza if Hopkins had divided the sestet and quatrain/tail—of "Pied Beauty" describes objects that, in being what they are, are gloriously themselves. Furthermore, there is a sort of progression downwards, as it were, from the "skies of couple-colour" (2) to plants and animals on the earth ("a brinded cow" (2), "trout that swim" (3), fallen chestnuts on the ground (4), and "finches' wings" (4)), to the land itself, "plotted and pieced" (5) in pastures and fields active and fallow. Agriculture serves here as the connecting metaphor between the natural world and man, for the next line, the last of the sestet, praises even man's occupations, with all "their gear and tackle and trim" (6). It may be that the trade of the just man who justices is among these, which would suggest a unity between the two poems; if so, then perhaps Hopkins implies that even in the ordinary jobs of men, God "keeps all [our] goings graces".

The quatrain and tail of "Pied Beauty" exalt all unique things (7) and their variety—"whatever is fickle, freckled" (8). Then, in a list of alliterative antonymous adjectives (9), Hopkins attempts to give some dimension to the magnitude of the different things that are. All of the wonders of creation that Hopkins so appreciates are the work of the God who "fathers-forth" (10) these things. In line ten we finally see what is perhaps the key word of the poem: beauty. In another paradox, the beauty of these varied things, all of them ephemeral, is also the grandeur of God "whose beauty is past change" (10). Again, the particular is made universal in the divine. The tail of the poem is almost devastating in its simplicity: "Praise him" (11). Having made all these artful rhymes extolling the beauty of the world, Hopkins sums up his poem in a simple exhortation to praise God.

Both poems are read easily enough as odes to the splendor of creation. But on another level—quite appropriately, considering Hopkins's vocation as a Jesuit—the two poems can be read for their biblical allusions and religious imagery. "Pied Beauty" has fewer biblically-inspired lines, being rather a hymn to nature of an almost pagan degree. [2] The "trout that swim" in line 3 may hearken back to the ichthys of early Christianity, but by and large the poem is devoid of explicit reference to religion except for the first and last two lines. On the other hand, the first line of [As Kingfishers Catch Fire...] summons up representations of both Christ and Satan. "Kingfishers" recalls Christ the King who called us to be "fishers of men", while "dragonflies" evokes those descriptions of the devil both as a dragon and as Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies. Though the fire caught and flames drawn refer to the brightness of kingfishers and dragonflies when in the light, they may also refer to the purifying fire of purgatory or infernal flames of hell. The "tucked string" (3) reminds us of Psalm 150, suggesting that we "praise [God] with the psaltery and harp"; hung bells (3) of course remind the reader of church bells. Hopkins's idea that Christ can be "lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his" (13) is a decidedly anti-gnostic one: it necessitates that God does not spurn corporeal form. (Hopkins speaks metaphorically of course; he does not mean to argue that there are literally thousands of incarnations of Christ.) As we see in both poems, Hopkins views the physical not as a deterioration of spirit, but rather as a celebration of it.

In the heightened spiritual state of seeing the inscape of a thing, every thing that proclaims itself becomes a sacrament—not one of the seven proper sacraments of the Church, but nonetheless a physical manifestation with a heavenly meaning. Hopkins's delight in observing the natural world, his pleasure in seeing each thing doing that which it should, was for him the joy of recognizing God's hand at work. The notion of inscape, accepting the fundamental aptness of every "mortal thing", exalts matter, not over spirit, but certainly up to the same plane as spirituality. Implicitly, it is a condemnation of those things that go against nature (or at least, against the individual nature of the thing itself), and of those people who would wrongly separate grace from nature. In an age of industrialization, rampant "progress", and increasing alienation from the physical world, Hopkins still penned hymns of praise vindicating nature in all its forms.

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Works Cited
Everett, Glenn. "Hopkins on "Inscape" and "Instress"."
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. "[As Kingfishers Catch Fire...]."
---. "Pied Beauty."
Pitchford, Lois W. "The Curtal Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins." Modern Language Notes 67 (1952): 165-169.

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Footnotes
1. Angelus Silesius, another Roman Catholic convert, priest and poet, whom it is quite possible Hopkins had read, wrote in the seventeenth century that all the blessed are one and that every Christian must be Christ (cf. Der cherubinische Wandersmann V, 7 & 9). Surely Hopkins is getting at the same thing at the end of [As Kingfishers Catch Fire...]. [back]
2. One is reminded of St. Francis of Assisi, who thanked God for "Brother Sun" and "Sister Moon". For Francis, too, the physical world proclaimed God's glory. [back]