The Windhover
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.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
I woke up this morning with the first two lines of this poem in my head—“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding”—and I almost made it to the end of the second line from memory. I love this poem. I love the sounds, the almost-excessive alliteration and rhyme (end and internal), and the way Gerard Manley Hopkins imposed his “sprung rhythm” on the line. (“Sprung rhythm” is hard to explain, but I know he was actively messing with the meter a couple of decades before Eliot and Pound. I always look to the irregularity of “dapple-dawn-drawn”—and its beauty—for an example of rhythm that’s been “sprung” from staid regularity.)
Most of the time I have to tease out the “meaning” again (hint: look at the epigraph)—and Hopkins did us no favors with this task by inventing words like “sillion”—but a lot of times I read this poem just for the sound of it. I know we all want meaning in our lives and we look for it everywhere. But isn’t it nice to just appreciate beautiful sounds, especially in the morning? Read this poem aloud. Or, if you don’t think you can do it justice, the Poetry Foundation has a very cheesy recording of it that will probably do the trick.
Good morning to all. My own work can begin now.
-R
