In 1885 Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote his brother Everard,

"I am sweetly soothed by your saying that you could make anyone understand my poem by reciting it well. That is what I always hoped, thought, and said; it is my precise aim."

For Hopkins, a poem "must be spoken; ’till it is spoken it is not performed."

Hopkins’ poems cry out for performance because of their sounds, their rhythms, their shapes. Their sounds are playful, chiming, orchestral: driving snow is "wiry and white-fiery," grey clouds are "down-dugged, ground-hugged," evening is "earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous,...stupendous."

Their rhythms—often Hopkins’ famed "sprung rhythm"—are regular yet free: stresses are firm, yet unstressed syllables aren’t counted. Thus the short line "Áll félled, félled, are áll felled" (six syllables) and the long line "As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend:the hurl and gliding..." (fifteen syllables) are both five-stress, or iambic, lines.

The poems’ shapes (or forms) are likewise original and strange: one "sonnet" has 24 lines, one huge sentence has 66 words and covers seven lines. Such qualities make Hopkins’ poems cry out for an actor’s voice to sound their music, urge their rhythms, and clarify their shapes and sentences.

But who was this Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) who crafted such sound-poems? Oxford-educated and an English Jesuit priest, he spent his life teaching and doing parish work in Britain and Ireland, and died unknown as a poet. His Oxford friend and fellow-poet Robert Bridges guarded his work, not publishing it until 1918 when he thought the time ripe. By the 1930s the world began to grasp Hopkins’ genius: modern before modernism, spiritual without being cloying, prophetically ecological, fresh beyond imagining.

Decades before the 20th-century modernism of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Hopkins cleansed English poetry of its wordiness, sentimentality and stuffiness, returning it to its Anglo-Saxon roots. In place of sentimental Victorian piety he found God in cows and trout and blacksmiths, even in the pain of "God’s cold."

As an early ecologist he decried tree-cutting near Oxford, gave voice to a Lancashire landscape that had "no tongue to plead," and at a waterfall in Scotland cried out, "O let them be left, wildness and wet; / Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

Above all he wrote poems of freshness that compel the reader through striking words and images and metaphors. As in Anglo-Saxon poetry, he compounded words for power and originality; "moth-soft Milky Way," "my cries heave, herds-long," or, even more starkly, "Goldengrove," "betweenpie," "fallowbootfellow," "churlsgrace."

He reforged parts of speech, turning nouns into verbs ("Let him easter in us"), participles into nouns ("leaves me a lonely began"), nouns into adjectives ("a madrigal start"). Hopkins’ images and metaphors are likewise distinctive. Stars are "fire-folk sitting in the air," "bright boroughs," "circle citadels." In bleak late autumn, "worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie." For a young soldier, Holy Communion becomes "Christ’s royal ration," "from cupboard fetched." He even dignifies a hungry, predatory kestrel as "morning’s minion," "daylight’s dauphin," "dapple-dawn-drawn falcon," even an emblem of Christ.

Hopkins was right: his words, his sounds, his images cry out for performance. Richard Austin provides the performer’s voice, creating his performance—Hopkins’ performance—with an actor’s skill, clarity, subtlety, and music.