As kingfishers catch fire

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Victorian poet in era, but nearly Modern in skill and vision. Virtually unknown in his lifetime, his poems are now recognized for their use of "sprung rhythm," a system of meter that Hopkins himself created that captures the natural inflections and tones in speech and capitalizes on them, as well as "inscape," "the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things," and "instress," "either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder." Inscape can be succinctly described as the innate essence of a thing; instress as the impression the thing communicates to the seer. These visionary elements are all wrapped up in one of my favorite poems, "As kingfishers catch fire." Read it aloud and listen to the flawless rhythm:

As kingfishers catch fire

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 What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that 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.