A falcon rides the morning air, rolling and striding along the steady currents, and the sheer beauty of the thing catches the breath like a revelation. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote this sonnet in 1877 while training as a Jesuit priest, dedicating it "To Christ our Lord," and in the bird's mastery of wind he found an emblem of divine splendour buckling into mortal form. The poem's coined language, its sprung rhythm compressed to the point of explosion, enacts the very plunge it describes: the moment when something beautiful sacrifices its flight and, in falling, reveals a fire far lovelier than mere soaring. Here is devotion as athletic attention, each stressed syllable a genuflection before the dangerous brightness of the world.