In much of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry, "a terror lest natural beauty fade unharvested is the dominant note…With such statling clearness did he realize that only through man's mind is Nature made transitorily beautiful – 'quench this clearest-selved spark' and 'both are in an unfathomable dark drowned' – yet only in Christ by man's free will can both be made beautiful for ever." (Christopher Devlin, S.J.)
Hopkins saw and enacted the patristic notion that human beings are the priests of creation – our divine vocation is to turn creation toward God in a cosmic liturgy. Beauty sings to us, and we must redirect these songs of praise to God. In this sense, Hopkins' oeuvre is a eucharistic hymnal, and he shows us poetry as a quintessentially Christian act that is essential to the Church's mission in the world.
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