Geoffrey Hill And The Windhover by Gerard Manly Hopkins

Windhover by Gerard Manly Hopkins

 

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: shéer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

                                              ***

Notes:

Dedication inserted 7 years later by GMH - praise is explicit – offering the best (he) the poet can do

Minion – darling (French). Dauphin – son of French king. Dapple – spotted light. Assonance of repeated d’s. Riding – horse (image)

Hawke riding the wind. Striding – horse. Rung – pivot. Rung upon the rein – horse training. Wimple – ripple, nun’s headdress. Ecstasy – trance, rapture. Then off – swerve

Skate – skater on ice (image). Bow-bend – figure of 8. Contrast of hurl (throw) and glide (steady)

Against the wind. Observe in secret, moved by bird (action). The mastery of the brute (thing) – not or beyond human, God-like

‘oh’ – revelation (exclamation). Buckle! – horseman, chivalry, armour & sword belt. Capitalisation. Fire – divine spark. Much better than the poet can say. Love (beauty) and fear (danger). Chevalier – horseman (French)

Plod – walk slowly with heavy steps. Sillion – thick, shiny soil turned by plough (harvest). Embers – final flickering of life (fire image). Vermillion – deep, brilliant shade of red – (could be) blood of Christ, crucifixion (fall, gall, gash).

Bird of prey = knight is killer

1 octave, a sextet (2 triplets). Written  in 1877 whilst attending religious studies @ St Bueno’s seminary in North Wales. GMH studied Ruskin’s Element Of Drawing (1857) – learning to see

                                                                                ***

Geoffrey Hill on the Windhover and Gerard Manly Hopkins

“Challenge to anyone who wants to write or speak about any poem” – poetry is “intractable and insoluble”

Windhover – “condemn the reader to an unresolved present tense”

Exuberance of the act seems at odds with the constraints of language – executed by the poet to “embarrass our critical faculties”

Challenge to the poet (any poet) – response to natural beauty and terror – “so changeable … as to render them as unmanageable by the standard rhetorical structures of poetry” – the constraints of the octave and triplets, syntax, enjambment

GMH believed in the milieu of his time, in earnestness about things – pursuit of sincerity, but not as an overused trope – penetrating the veil (fashion)

Purpose of earnestness is “none of your damn subjective rot” – like the technical earnestness GMH discerned in the music of Henry Purcell – how he succeeded in translating thought to sound

Conflict between observation (impartiality) and observance (compliance) – the sensuality of the thing (touch, feel) and the intellectualisation (distance and objectification) – difficulty of matching experience with expression

“However graceful the kestrel (windhover), it would never be in a state of grace. And however murderous its intentions towards field mice, it would never incur damnation”

GMH in a letter to Robert Bridges – the poem Hurrahing In Harvest (1876) was “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home … from fishing in the Elwy”

“Spontaneous expression of poetical feeling”

Wordsworth –

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration

William Wordsworth: Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798

Sudden burst of inspiration – but it took GMH much longer to finesse and to finish the poem – the ‘ecstasy’ in watching the kestrel

Saw Shakespearean elements in Keats – but was troubled by his focus on sensation (like his own poetry) – but also knew that Keats would “find his way right at last to the true function of the mind” (contemplation of perfection, divinity)

Other concerns (GMH quotes) –

Question of form, between religion and representation

“Markedness of rhythm” (sonnet form) and “naturalness of expression”

How to achieve a “state of attention at once spontaneous and exacting”

A shift “from the less to the more so” (theological origin)

But often the self-entanglement – “I have of myself made verse so laborious”

Like the windhover (rebuffed the wind), Hill says GMH “writes against the language” – not against the grain, or against the stream – but by leveraging the language, ‘by allowing  long, soaring lines to ride on meter’. This lead to a “radical involvement” with the elements of the language, and thus resolving, to some extent, the hostility and tension between structure and spontaneity

“the inflections of ideas could be, in an immediate sense, the inflections of grammar” – and inflections of drama 

Reconciling his Art and Theology – depiction and devotion – in praising the windhover, he praises the Lord – representation is no longer antithetical to devotion