Welcome back to the daily poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, July 15th, 2020.

Today's poem is by Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet and Jesuit priest, who lived from 1844 to 1889.

His birthday was July 28th, so this is his birthday month. So I thought I'd go ahead and share a poem with you by him.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is one of his most famous poems, is called

As King Fischer's Catch Fire.

The reason I wanted to read it is because I was able to edit an anthology of poems that is now out.

It's called 30 Poems to Memorize Before It's Too Late, kind of a tongue-in-cheek title of sorts.

But it's full of great poems

that are worth memorizing. They're chosen specifically because they're memorizable. And then also

it includes essays that help, you know, explore what those poems are doing. And one of the poems

that we included is this poem, as King Fitchers Catch Fire, and it's accompanied

by an essay by poet Morris Manning.

So I want to share some of his thoughts, a brief snippet of his thoughts from his essay in this

book after I read the poem.

So first, here is the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

As King Fischer's Catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,

As tumbled over rim and roundy wells, stones ring,

Like each tucked string tells, each hung bells bow, swung, finds tongue to fling outbroad its name.

Each moral thing does one thing and the same,

deals out that being indoors, each one dwells.

Sells goes itself, myself it speaks and spells, crying,

What I do is me, for that I came.

...