Complete Text
To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,
in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air,
and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling
wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend:
the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery
of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride,
plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then,
a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down
sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Summary
The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover
in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground
in search of prey. The poet describes how he saw (or “caught”) one
of these birds in the midst of its hovering. The bird strikes the
poet as the darling (“minion”) of the morning, the crown prince
(“dauphin”) of the kingdom of daylight, drawn by the dappled colors
of dawn. It rides the air as if it were on horseback, moving with
steady control like a rider whose hold on the rein is sure and firm.
In the poet’s imagination, the windhover sits high and proud, tightly
reined in, wings quivering and tense. Its motion is controlled and
suspended in an ecstatic moment of concentrated energy. Then, in
the next moment, the bird is off again, now like an ice skater balancing
forces as he makes a turn. The bird, first matching the wind’s force
in order to stay still, now “rebuff[s] the big wind” with its forward
propulsion. At the same moment, the poet feels his own heart stir,
or lurch forward out of “hiding,” as it were—moved by “the achieve
of, the mastery of” the bird’s performance.
The opening of the sestet serves as both a further elaboration
on the bird’s movement and an injunction to the poet’s own heart.
The “beauty,” “valour,” and “act” (like “air,” “pride,” and “plume”)
“here buckle.” “Buckle” is the verb here; it denotes either a fastening
(like the buckling of a belt), a coming together of these different
parts of a creature’s being, or an acquiescent collapse (like the
“buckling” of the knees), in which all parts subordinate themselves
into some larger purpose or cause. In either case, a unification
takes place. At the moment of this integration, a glorious fire
issues forth, of the same order as the glory of Christ’s life and
crucifixion, though not as grand.
Form
The confusing grammatical structures and sentence order
in this sonnet contribute to its difficulty, but they also represent
a masterful use of language. Hopkins blends and confuses adjectives,
verbs, and subjects in order to echo his theme of smooth merging:
the bird’s perfect immersion in the air, and the fact that his self and
his action are inseparable. Note, too, how important the “-ing”
ending is to the poem’s rhyme scheme; it occurs in verbs, adjectives,
and nouns, linking the different parts of the sentences together
in an intense unity. A great number of verbs are packed into a short
space of lines, as Hopkins tries to nail down with as much descriptive
precision as possible the exact character of the bird’s motion.
“The Windhover” is written in “sprung rhythm,” a meter
in which the number of accents in a line are counted but the number
of syllables does not matter. This technique allows Hopkins to vary
the speed of his lines so as to capture the bird’s pausing and racing.
Listen to the hovering rhythm of “the rolling level underneath him
steady air,” and the arched brightness of “and striding high there.”
The poem slows abruptly at the end, pausing in awe to reflect on
Christ.
Commentary
This poem follows the pattern of so many of Hopkins’s
sonnets, in that a sensuous experience or description leads to a
set of moral reflections. Part of the beauty of the poem lies in
the way Hopkins integrates his masterful description of a bird’s
physical feat with an account of his own heart’s response at the
end of the first stanza. However, the sestet has puzzled many readers
because it seems to diverge so widely from the material introduced
in the octave. At line nine, the poem shifts into the present tense,
away from the recollection of the bird. The horse-and-rider metaphor
with which Hopkins depicted the windhover’s motion now give way
to the phrase “my chevalier”—a traditional Medieval image of Christ
as a knight on horseback, to which the poem’s subtitle (or dedication)
gives the reader a clue. The transition between octave and sestet
comes with the statement in lines 9-11 that
the natural (“brute”) beauty of the bird in flight is but a spark
in comparison with the glory of Christ, whose grandeur and spiritual
power are “a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous.”
The first sentence of the sestet can read as either descriptive
or imperative, or both. The idea is that something glorious happens
when a being’s physical body, will, and action are all brought into
accordance with God’s will, culminating in the perfect self-expression.
Hopkins, realizing that his own heart was “in hiding,” or not fully
committed to its own purpose, draws inspiration from the bird’s
perfectly self-contained, self-reflecting action. Just as the hovering
is the action most distinctive and self-defining for the windhover,
so spiritual striving is man’s most essential aspect. At moments
when humans arrive at the fullness of their moral nature, they achieve
something great. But that greatness necessarily pales in comparison
with the ultimate act of self-sacrifice performed by Christ, which
nevertheless serves as our model and standard for our own behavior.
