Hopkins’ hyphenation of being and doing gets some support from the fact that, as Heidegger reminds his readers, Sein, Being, is a verbal-noun. This reminder gives continual support to his exegesis in the Introduction to Metaphysics of Sophocles’ Antigone because that exegesis is embedded in an exegesis of Parmenides’ teaching that being and thinking are inseparable. Furthermore, rather as the philosophical thinking of Parmenides stands behind Heidegger's exegesis of Sophocles’ poetry, a philosophical reflection on Parmenides’ teaching stands behind the writing of Hopkins’ poems. This holds chronologically in the sense that most of his poems were composed after, as an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1860s, he had composed the short essay on Parmenides. It holds also thematically in the sense that notions which are expressed in that essay, written before he had read Scotus, emerge in some of his poems and later prose. One such poem is ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ (1882). This includes the lines:

The first of these lines and the reference to being in the second hark back to the statement in Hopkins’ essay on Parmenides that ‘Parmenides will say that the mind's grasp – noein, the foreshadowing act – that this is blood or that blood is red is to be looked for in Being, the foredrawn, alone, not in the thing we named blood or the blood we worded as being red.’ To this Hopkins adds the gloss: ‘“phatisesthai” is to “give it a name”, to come out with something, to word or put a thought or thing’. This notion of ‘putting a thought or thing’ and the affirmation of the ‘simple yes’ (Hopkins’ emphasis) of Being in the exegesis of Parmenides recur in the Comments on The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola in the statement that ‘pitch is ultimately simple positiveness’. Positiveness is posedness or putness, something's having been set (gesetzt), as in a proposition (a Satz).