News at Eleven: "The kingfishers sonnet is about

the Scotist individuation of things," [Paul] Mariani writes of the poem's theological roots in the medieval Duns Scotus, "where…the opening lines flame out, and where things reveal themselves. . . . But more: it is about Christ playing--acting in all seriousness, at the same time delighting in the never-again-to-be-replaced distinctiveness of human beings in ten thousand separate places and revealed in the faces of those who keep God's graces":

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.

from PBS: Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly: Gerard Manley Hopkins

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