Doing Theology With Poetry—Abram Van Engen

When I first fell in love with poetry, I had no idea what I was reading. The poem—a compact little thing of two stanzas by Gerard Manley Hopkins—had a series of words that all seemed to make sense individually, but simply confused when they were combined. It was apparent from the beginning, however, that the poet’s goal was not just to convey some kind of message or meaning or principle or point in this odd arrangement of words. The poem was many things, but it was clearly not an instruction manual, a sermon, a thesis, a set of rules, or a series of propositions. Something else was happening here—something the music I heard in the lines only hinted at. Here is this poem that hooked me:

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
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;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — 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.

For me, it was that inner sound, the music of seemingly misplaced words, that made the poem. It lured me. I wanted to know more. But understanding the poem seemed second to appreciating it as such. As T.S. Eliot once said about the work of George Herbert: “We must enjoy the poetry before we attempt to understand it, if the attempt to understand it is to be worth the trouble.”

In the case of Hopkins, the “trouble” seemed worth all the trouble I could give it, even if I could not say why. So I started digging. I started studying. And the more I understood of Hopkins, the more beautiful and compelling this work became. What started with a tune of seemingly meaningless words became, in time, a compact theology of grace, faith, and vocation. And yet, for all that, it was never reducible to the theology it conveyed. The point of the poem was never, in itself, the point. What mattered instead was still the tune—the saying of these things in this way. As the poet Matthew Zapruder has written, “The usefulness of poetry has less to do with delivering messages (which we can just as easily get from prose), and far more to do with what poems can do to our language, reenlivening and reactivating it, and thereby drawing us into a different form of attention and awareness.”

Hopkins drew me to attention. And in the process, he drew out how poetry and theology relate. If poetry is not a compact delivery system for theological propositions, then what does it add to the work of theology, and how does theology when instantiated in poetic form?

In contemplating such questions, consider the theology at work in “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Throughout these fourteen lines, Hopkins claims that things are what they do. Kingfishers, for example, are incredibly colorful birds. When the light catches them right, they look like a flame bursting bright against the sky. But since that happens in the movement of catching fish, it looks as though the kingfishers are catching fire while they feed. It is a dazzling image of explosive color peculiar to the action of a kingfisher in flight. So, too, the caught light of a late afternoon can turn a dragonfly’s wings to flames. We can almost see the poet wandering beside a lake, dazzled by these displays of fire, flame, and light—a world in action defining itself in the movements of a setting sun.

This image Hopkins deploys does more, however, than present a picture of a lakeside scene. These creatures of God, for all they seem lit by an inner light defining what they are, become that light from a source outside themselves. The sun makes possible the scene. Kingfishers and dragonflies are catching fire and drawing flame from somewhere else. Their action may define them, but the radiance of that action relies on an external reality sustaining all they do.

From there the paradox opens out into further images that exemplify the point. In the next line, Hopkins moves from lively creatures to lifeless stones. But even here, even with stones, we know what they are by what they do, how they behave. A stone is a stone because of the sound it makes when tossed into a well. Viktor Schklovsky, an old Russian literary critic, once said that the point of poetry was to make us newly familiar with all that we have taken for granted. “Art exists,” he said, “that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” For Hopkins, the ring in that roundy well of a stone’s fall is precisely what makes a stone stony. The same can be said for strings, which are strings precisely because of the way they can be plucked. The plucking—like the tossing and tumbling of stones—makes them what they are.

These images for the ears—ringing stones and plucked strings—culminate in Hopkins’ description of a bell. A bell is a bell only insofar as it chimes or rings or gongs. Without the sound, it is a literally a hollow shell of itself. Hopkins seems almost to be saying that there is no such thing as a “bell” in the abstract. A motionless bell is no bell at all. We know what a bell is only by the way it chimes. The movement and the music make the thing.

What makes Hopkins’ poem so incredible (and what made me ultimately fall in love with this art form) is that in making his point, he includes the sound of the bell. We actually hear it ring three times in the lines that Hopkins writes. You can hear it as well if you replace the words “hung,” “swung,” and “tongue” with a gong:

… each gong bell’s

Bow gong finds gong to fling out broad its name.

… each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name.

The saying is the doing. Hopkins swings the bell and makes it chime as he defines exactly what it is. And more than that: Hopkins works with the speed of words—how fast and slow we form and speak them as we read—to give the rhythm of a large bell swinging back and forth.

With that hung bell’s bow swinging and resounding in our ears, we can glance back at the lines that just came before. Hopkins, it turns out, has done the same throughout. We can hear the strings being plucked in “like each tucked string tells.” We can even hear (though it’s slightly harder) the echo of a stone as it falls through a well: “As tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones ring.” The echo is in that word “roundy” which comes just before the final “ring.”

In a poem that defines things by what they do, Hopkins does what he says. The words perform what they describe. And that gives us a clue not just to what Hopkins is saying in this poem—what theology he is relying upon to write it—but also how poems shape the doing of theology itself. Theology, the study of God and God’s relationship with all things, can be abstracted into principles, but ideally its purpose is to influence life. Theology exists to be lived. And poems which perform theology enact ideas as the words take form. Many poems quite intentionally do what they say. They embody ideas in experience; the experience makes the thought.

In Hopkins’ poem, the main idea has to do with how we define and understand identity. Breaking from the imagery of his first four lines, Hopkins turns to an observation—a kind of insight drawn from the images that drive the poem. Birds, bugs, stones, strings, and bells—in each case, the conclusion is the same. These things “speak and spell” their “selves” by how they live and move and have their being in this world. “What I do is me.” That, says Hopkins, is the call and cry of everything.

And yet, as we saw in the first line, nothing quite does what it does alone. Hopkins uses an accent to stress the word “do”: “What I do is me.” If the stress had fallen elsewhere, it might be untrue: “What I do is me.” After all, what each thing does in this poem is never done solely by that I. The light spreads fire and flame. Someone tosses or knocks the stone. Strings cannot be plucked on their own. A bell rings when it swings, but someone has to pull the rope. The cry of everything may be true—they are what they do—and yet none of them does anything without a power beyond themselves to set them in motion or sustain them in flight.

Taken together, the images (first four lines) and the observation (the second four lines) read almost like a finished poem. A typical sonnet (the form of this poem) is composed of a sight and an insight, a problem and a solution, a question and an answer. That break usually occurs across fourteen lines, with the turn (or volta) happening generally after the first eight lines (the octet) and before the final six (the sestet). Hopkins has condensed the sonnet’s two parts into the first eight lines. The poem, it would seem, is done. We have had sight (kingfishers, dragonflies, stones, strings, a bell) and we have had insight (What I do is me). We are done. And in fact, the poem breaks off as though complete, an open white space following those first eight lines.

Why, then, does the poem go on? What do we gain from the following lines?

In taking up that question, we should observe that a stanza is like a paragraph in prose. It serves as a little container, often making a point or offering an image complete unto itself. The word “stanza” actually comes from the Italian for “little room,” and that’s what we find here in Hopkins: two little rooms. We’ve already explored the first. And just at the point when we think that one room should suffice, we open the door, leave the room, and find a second.

What greets us in the second stanza seems, at first, like nothing but an extension of the first room, like an alcove or a balcony. “I say more,” Hopkins writes, as though he is simply adding another observation of the same point. Soon, though, we realize the observation has shifted the ground entirely. A new subject arises. The second stanza will take the thoughts of the first—the theology of the first—and ask whether and how they apply to human beings.

Here Hopkins offers both similarity and difference. On the one hand, yes, human beings (like all creatures) are what they do. The just man is the one who practices justice. And as Hopkins earlier seemed to suggest that a bell cannot exist in the abstract, so here he seems to claim that justice cannot, in fact, be a noun. Justice exists only where justice gets done. Properly speaking, Hopkins seems to say, justice is always a verb. And so he literalizes his point by turning the noun, “justice,” into a verb, “justices.” He is again doing what he says. In the same way, the person who has grace is the person who lives by grace. The theme of the poem continues.

On the other hand, the poem has introduced a subject that seems newly complicated. We are talking not about all human beings, but about some. We are differentiating ways of being human. Some people are just; others, presumably, are not. Some live by grace; others, maybe not. An element of choice and consciousness has entered the poem that was never present in the first room’s discussion of birds and bugs and stones and strings and bells. The just man chooses to act justly, and through that choice—by the very practice of justice as it takes place in the world—he becomes the just man.

This element of human agency guides us to the end of the poem. Ultimately, human beings are called to become what they are: the imago dei, the image of God in Christ. As Augustine famously said of the Eucharist, “Believe what you see, see what you believe and become what you are: the Body of Christ.” So, in every act of justice, in every instance of grace, human beings take on the visage of Christ. They become what they are and were intended to be, acting as Christ in God’s eye. The Body of Christ is spread in this way throughout all the world, in ten thousand places, where the limbs and eyes and features of so many different faces become the very limbs and eyes and features of Christ’s face playing back to God the Father.

With this additional insight, we certainly find ourselves in a second room. But notice that a continuity holds the poem together. Humans, like all created things, are what they do, but their doings depend on something else—something (or someone) beyond them. Kingfishers catch fire because they are caught in a light they never created. The grace that keeps all our graces going is not, ultimately, self-willed. We are irradiated internally by something external. It is Christ—lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his—that plays in ten thousand places through the features of our faces.

I love these lines because they remind me all too often of what I all too often forget: that the imago dei is hidden in plain sight. This world, for all its darkness—which Hopkins detailed in many other poems—is nonetheless filled with light. For all the evil that defines too much of what we do, Christ is still at play. The saints of God are spread everywhere, present in every small act of justice and grace, even when unrecognized. As the old French Catholic writer Charles Peguy once wrote, “It is obvious that there are infinitely more saints than public saints. We know from all sides that there have been innumerable secret saints. We know for certain that a very great number of saints have had no public life and that the Glory in heaven is the first which they attained.” Christ plays in ten thousand places, in ten thousand ways, in tens of thousands of acts every day in persons spread everywhere throughout the world—the image of God all around us, whether we recognize it or not.

All this, and still the poem is fourteen lines. That’s how poetry does theology. For all that the poem says and does and enables, it never gets any longer. Layer after layer can unfold as we learn more and more, but the poem always remains small enough to tuck back in the pocket of my mind –fourteen lines every time. That brevity makes poetry a powerful and portable theology. A few key lines—“the just man justices” or “Christ plays in ten thousand places”—can reanimate the entire experience.

In that sense, just as kingfishers catch flame or as a just man justices, so too do poems poem. They do what they say in such a way that the experience of the words brings alive the theology it conveys, so that the conveying is the living, the saying is the doing—the experience is the theology of the poem. How does theology change when embodied in a poem? It takes on body. That’s the point. We can learn all we want about a poem, we can know more and more, we can explore layer after layer in line after line, but in the end we have to turn back to the poem. We read it again. We say it out loud. We hear it. We experience it. We bring the words to flesh. Theology is meant to be lived, and poetry is an enactment of life.

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Originally published in Dappled Things.

Abram Van Engen is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and Executive Director of The Carver Project . He is the author of two books on early American religion and literature, and he also serves as co-host of the podcast Poetry For All.