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
Comments
Post a Comment