As Kingfishers Catch Fire
Everything in the world does the one thing it was made to do and in doing it says what it is: kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame, a stone rings down a well, each tucked string and hung bell flings out its own name. The turn puts the same principle to people and finds the just man justicing, keeping grace, and Christ playing in ten thousand places through limbs and eyes that are not his. The argument is Hopkins's inscape compressed into fourteen lines, and it comes out of Duns Scotus, whose account of the thisness of individual things he found in 1872 and never let go of.
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- 57% · 8 shared