IN GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS’S world of Christian faith and Jesuit rigor there exists always the incomparable gift of Christ’s love and sacrifice; it is the model for everything. And there is also ever present the story of Mary: her mercy and her power of intercession. Between these two presences Hopkins’s poems praise and leap, praise and shiver, praise and kneel, praise and self-condemn. It is a poetry of rapture and pain, of the perfection of God and the awkwardnesses and imperfections of the poet.
