In the Library
The Windhover
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
Keats watches another bird and finds the same ecstatic transcendence, but the nightingale escapes where Hopkins's falcon dives.
£1.99
Holy Sonnets
John Donne
Donne wrestles with the same God in the same compressed form, and the divine violence is as sudden as Hopkins's falcon's stoop.
£1.99
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
Wordsworth finds the same divinity in nature, but needs fourteen books where Hopkins needs fourteen lines.
£1.99
About the book
Watch a kestrel pin itself against a strong wind, wings beating to hold one point of sky perfectly still, and you have the thing Hopkins caught one morning in the Welsh hills and turned into the sonnet he called the best he ever wrote. The poem does not describe the bird so much as enact it: its sprung rhythm crams stress against stress until "dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon" and the "rolling level underneath him steady air" have to be spoken aloud, the mouth made to ride and rebuff the very wind the falcon rides. Hopkins was a Jesuit who had burned his early verse and vowed his whole gift to God, and the bird's sheer mastery breaks something open in him. At the turn, one word does the work of a theology: "Buckle" means both to clasp into glory and to crumple, and he refuses to choose. The proof comes in the last lines, a hearth's blue-bleak embers that fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion, beauty that lets out its fire only by breaking.