Kindred spirits …

… The praise singers: poets George Mackay Brown and Gerard Manley Hopkins. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… for both these extraordinary poets, bleakness and bewilderment yielded, in the end, to bliss. The members of Hopkins’ Dublin community who sat at his deathbed heard him murmur “I am so happy, I am so happy”. George died in the Balfour Hospital in Kirkwall in April 1996. Just before he lost consciousness, he said to the doctor and nurses attending him, “I see hundreds and hundreds of ships sailing out of the harbour.”