Tag: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Sonnet: ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’

When we look at a landscape, we probably aren’t thinking about it as a clamorous system of self-proclamations. Gerard Manley Hopkins saw it that way. For Hopkins, each thing in creation is continually proclaiming itself just by being. In the unconscious flutter of wings is the dramatic force of a being dealing out its inmost…


What Good Is Poetry? Making the Most of Life With A.E. Housman’s the ‘Loveliest of Trees’

Even in the awakening of new life in springtime and in Eastertide (the time that stretches beyond Easter), there comes the sweet yet sad reminder of the fleetingness of things, that all that lives must die. This is a favorite subject of poetry. The freshness of spring is all too brief, as Robert Frost’s famous…