Summary
The speaker of the poem, speaking from a short remove in time, begins by describing an experience they had “this morning.” The dense, elliptical language makes it difficult, at first, to tell exactly what’s being described, or even the nature of the experience, but after the first several lines it becomes clear the speaker is describing watching a falcon (a “windhover,” also known as a kestrel) in flight.
The speaker goes on to describe, in great detail, the falcon’s movements through the air. At first the bird appears to be hovering, perhaps riding a thermal (pockets of rising hot air birds use to gain elevation)—i.e., “underneath him steady air” (line 3). The falcon then seems to swoop away on a gust: “rung upon the rein of a wimpling wind,” “off forth on swing, / As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend” (4-6). Skillfully using this momentum, the kestrel holds its own against a countervailing gust: “the hurl and gliding / Rebuffed the big wind,” despite its small size (6-7).
The beauty, grace, and “mastery” on display in the falcon’s flight rouses the speaker’s “Heart in hiding,” a state of withdrawal or retreat from the world alluded to only in passing, and moves him to reflect on other, similarly unexpected or unlikely sources of beauty and inspiration. The “shéer plód,” i.e., the unremarkable toil, of ploughing turns up the rich, glittering “sillion”; embers, even as they fall, “gall themselves” (i.e., break apart) briefly blaze up “and gash gold-vermillion.”
Analysis
The opening lines of “The Windhover,” on first reading, are most striking for the intensity and richness of their sonic patterning and the seemingly intentional obliqueness with which they approach their subject, announced in the title. Though taking the form of the description of an actual event (“I caught this morning…”), these first few lines pile metaphor on metaphor at a pace matched only by the proliferation of alliteration, assonance, consonance, and internal rhymes. This series of paratactic clauses keeps the reader suspended, at the same time as the complex sound structure slows our reading down. The cheeky enjambment of “king- / dom”, coupled with the fact that the word “king” follows immediately on its apparent opposite, “minion,” also contributes to this sense of epistemological “hovering,” as it were.
As that description suggests, Hopkins’ purpose here isn’t intentional obscurity for the sake of poetic flair. Instead, the poet uses both formal devices and diction (“dauphin” and “minion” being, even in Hopkins’ time, not exactly colloquial) to draw the reader into the speaker’s experience, which at the same time mimics the alternately dynamic, exuberant movement and searching “hover” of the bird itself.
Once we too “catch” (sight of) the “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,” the pace of the poem picks up significantly. While still highly alliterative and complex sonically, these devices are not nearly as pronounced in lines like “Of the rolling level underneath him steady air” as they are in the first few lines. More variation in the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (vs the rhythmically repetitive “I caught this morn-ing morn-ing’s min-ion”) causes the rhythm to “spring” forward, again mimicking the deft speed and sudden changes in pace of the falcon’s flight.
The purpose of Hopkins’ poem, however, is not to simply capture the beauty and grace of this moment, but to “catch,” to fix in words the way it “stirr[ed]” the speaker’s “heart in hiding.” While we don’t know exactly what drove his heart into hiding to begin with—though the phrases “shéer plód,” along with “gall” and “gash” provide further clues—the dedication tells us who the speaker ultimately thanks for coaxing him back into full engagement with the world: “Christ our Lord.”
Though the text of “The Windhover” itself, notably, lacks direct references to Christ or God, subtle intimations of His presence recur throughout. Some are more obvious—the “wimpling wing” clearly invoking the wimples worn by nuns—and some less so. We might read the opening lines, for example, with their insistence on “morning” and “daylight” as obliquely referencing the first lines of the Bible, when God says “let there be light.” The phrase “daylight’s dauphin,” meaning roughly the heir apparent to daylight, or son of the king of daylight, then starts to seem plausible as a reference to Christ as well as to the falcon. It is God/Christ who has hidden “sillion” in the plodding toil of life; while bringing one’s heart out of hiding is “more dangerous,” it’s also “lovelier.” And, Hopkins suggests, the “gash” in ourselves opened by a “fall” might, even as it galls, also open us up to receive the burning light of God’s truth.
