Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

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:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells,

Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;

Crying Whát I dó is me; for that I came.

I say móre; the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce; thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –

Christ – 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.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

It is impossible to read this poem in a hurry, once the first flashing images of kingfisher and dragonfly have startled your inner eye. The words insist on being taken one at a time. They sound: each one in turn reverberates like the bell and twang and dropping stones of the first lines.

And so do each of us, and every single thing in this world, the poet is telling us. Our uniqueness sings out. We declare ourselves in every gesture. Every cell in our bodies is stamped with our personal code. Every hair, every freckle, every breath - and leaf, bird, paperclip - says 'Here I am, this is me.' Every separate thing we see expresses its selfhood. It selves, is perfectly itself.

Separately and in an unceasing clamour, everything squeaks 'I am.' For some reason I have for years misread 'squeaks' for 'speaks', as: myself it squeaks and spells. From an A Course in Miracles point of view, I think my mistake improves the poem. For there is something plaintive, paltry as well as wonderful, about the incomparable specialness of every thing that is. We have imputed the infinite and marvellous variety of life forms - like the astonishing blue of a kingfisher wing, like the supple fish he is about to snatch - to the vast creative imagination of the God who we supposed made us, too, all gloriously different. But Richard Dawkins's phrase The Selfish Gene comes closer to describing the mind that the Course tells us made the world we see: our own mind, seeing what it wants to see: its own turmoil and conflict projected outside itself into a seeming universe of differences:

You have made up names for everything you see. Each one becomes a separate entity, identified by its own name. By this you carve it out of unity. By this you designate its special attributes, and set it off from other things by emphasizing space surrounding it. This space you lay between all things to which you give a different name; all happenings in terms of place and time; all bodies which are greeted by a name.

This space you see as setting off all things from one another is the means by which the world's perception is achieved. You see something where nothing is, and see as well nothing where there is unity; a space between all things, between all things and you. Thus do you think that you have given life in separation. By this split you think you are established as a unity which functions with an independent will (W184).

But if we can for a moment tune down the cacophony of separate selves, we may hear 'each mortal thing' singing the same song, of life beyond, behind, and within all its special differences. This is the essence of the Course: to use what seems separate, to learn that nothing is separate.  Such is the Holy Spirit's kind perception of specialness; His use of what you made, to heal instead of harm. To each He gives a special function in salvation he alone can fill; a part for only him (T25 VI 4).

Manley Hopkins's own religion did not distinguish, as the Course does, between the

apparent world of separate bodies and shifting forms, and the real world of spirit and changelessness. But he did perceive what the Course would have us see: that the multitude of different masks hide a single identity. The kingfisher and the dragonfly, you and I, everything have one reality in common. Christ plays in ten thousand places. Not one of us alone is either whole or true, but the whole truth is in each of us, for us to see in each other and allow to find expression in ourselves.