“The Windhover” is a sonnet written in 1887 and the best-known work of the English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. Though unpublished in the author’s lifetime, it is now widely considered one of the crowning achievements of Victorian poetry in English, and a significant link between that era and literary modernism. Dedicated to “Christ our Lord,” the poem recounts an ecstatic experience of natural beauty on the part of the speaker, occasioned by the sight of a kestrel (the titular “windhover,” both denoting a particular breed of small falcon) soaring in the wind.
The most notable features of the poem are the force and intricacy of its soundscape, its overwhelming exuberant tone and keen attention to visual detail, and its masterful use of the fast-paced “sprung rhythm,” a meter invented (or, in his own view, merely identified) by Hopkins. It is one of a number of sonnets Hopkins wrote in 1877, including “Pied Beauty,” in his final year at the Jesuit seminary St. Beuno’s in Wales, a period that the Hopkins scholar Jill Muller called “the spiritual and artistic height of his career” (52).
