This chapter proposes that Hopkins’s poems are distinctive in being actively and vividly addressed – to their subjects, to the imagined reader, and to God – or, at times, in staging forms of address that seem to have gone awry. The suggestion is that Hopkins makes poetic address morally vital; its turns and complexities map social, moral, and theological terrain.

This chapter explores the ways in which Hopkins was deliberately and accidentally in proximity to key sites of Victorian industrial progress throughout his life and career. It considers also his interest in the interplay and tension between nature and the industrial environment. This, the chapter proposes, is evident as much in the forms and structures of his poetry as in its content.

Hopkins developed an ecological poetics informed by evolutionary theory, energy physics, and Catholic theology, bearing witness to local devastations of an unsustainable Victorian global economy. His sensitivity to such degradation was heightened by exposure to a range of polluted regions and by the effort to convey poetically his embodied perception of environmental features and patterns. His poems present everything from flashing bird wings, to waves, to wheat fields as dynamically interrelated through the flow of energy, and therefore vulnerable to its squandering by human industry. Such waste is both ecologically and spiritually self-destructive for Hopkins, given that Christ is incarnate in every fibre and force of the material world. His later sonnet ‘Ribblesdale’ manifests these concerns by lamenting a river valley poisoned and denuded by globally destructive industry and industrialized agriculture, even as it affirms vulnerable, accountable membership in a wounded terrestrial body that is divinely indwelt.