As a self-effacing priest and Jesuit, distrustful of personal fame, Gerard Hopkins was not inclined to trumpet his work, and he died with it unpublished. but as an artist and master of the English language, he was well aware of the magnitude of his achievement, and eager that it find the audience it deserved.

Hopkins' solution to this dilemma was to give his poems over into the keeping fo God, trusting that if it were God's will, "the time may come for my verses" and that they might be, "followed up" in some way he could not forsee. Still, he was imaginative enough to guess that the phonograph might aid in this process, by allowing his verse to be "read with the ears."