Introduction
The Windhover: To Christ our Lord by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877) is a sonnet that is among the most impressive pieces in English literature. The poem takes a seemingly ordinary event, that is, the sight of a kestrel soaring in the morning sky, and animates it with a deep spiritual appeal.
The poem performs a remarkable act of analysis: the poet uses the flight of a bird as an allegory, questioning faith, aesthetic beauty, and the existence of God. A Jesuit priest and a great poet, Hopkins noticed the kestrel, also known as a windhover, as it could hover in the wind, and observed in its control of the air some reflection of the glory of Christ.
Another innovation that makes this poem outstanding is Hopkins’s use of syntax and rhythm. He developed a method he called sprung rhythm, a light and energized structure that alters the rhythm of the language in a way that allows the reader to sense the movement of the bird in motion. Written during a time of creative rediscovery, the sonnet challenges the audience to find the divine not only in grand cathedrals or theatrical displays, but also in the everyday experiences of the natural world.
The word-play is thick, and the imagery is heavily detailed, but the main message is as clear as a warning sign: divine beauty fills all places, even in the lone flight of a bird on a typical morning.
About the Poet
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) lived a life of unusual productivity and toil. He was born in Stratford, in East London (historically in Essex), into a very religious Anglican family, where he demonstrated prodigious literary talent at a tender age. He studied at Oxford University, where he experienced a dramatic conversion to Catholicism in 1866, and two years later joined the Society of Jesus as a Jesuit.
This decision came at a cost. Hopkins burned his early poems, believing that poetry and priesthood could not coexist. For years, he wrote nothing. But poetry kept calling to him, and eventually, he answered—though he never published during his lifetime.
After his ordination in 1877, Hopkins served as a teacher and priest in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. He was often lonely, frequently ill, and felt like an outsider. Yet during these years, he created some of the most innovative poetry in the English language.
Hopkins developed unique concepts to describe what he saw: “inscape” (the essential inner nature of things) and “instress” (the energy that lets us perceive that nature). His major works include “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and sonnets like “God’s Grandeur.”
He died of typhoid fever in Dublin at just forty-four years old. His poems were not published until 1918, nearly thirty years after his death, when his friend Robert Bridges edited the volume Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Modern criticism recognizes him as a pioneer poet whose work radically changed the sound of English poetry, broadened its expressive abilities, and combined deep religious faith with a strong sense of imagery.
Understanding the Title
The Windhover: To Christ our Lord works on various levels of interpretation.
The common kestrel is a small falcon, and the English vernacular name “windhover” refers to this bird being able to stand still in the air, hovering into the wind. This image suggests control, grace, and power.
However, Hopkins goes a step further. By adding the dedication To Christ our Lord, he reinvents the bird and makes it a figure of Christ. The power of the kestrel to hover in grace and power and seeming sacrifice is seen as the mastership of Christ, who controls the skies as the bird controls its levels and stands against the odds like spiritual strength.
The poem is filled with Hopkins’s interest in the terminology of falconry. In his reference to the bird as “rung upon the rein,” he brings to mind the image of a trained hunting falcon—noble, controlled, and connected with a higher purpose.
Even the hyphenated name of the poem, Windhover, is the thematic centerpiece of the poem: a collision of forces, something like the union of earth and heaven, creature and Creator.
Background and Context
The Windhover was written by Hopkins on 13 May 1877, at a time when he was changing as both a person and an artist. He was at St Beuno’s College in North Wales, going through what Jesuits call “tertianship,” which is a year of intensive spiritual training and renewal.
This was a period of recovery for Hopkins. He had been struggling with depression and doubt, but in Wales, surrounded by stunning countryside where kestrels were common, something shifted. He began writing poetry again after years of silence.
The location matters. Wales, with its dramatic landscapes and soaring birds of prey, gave Hopkins the raw material for his vision. He was teaching classics, walking the hills, and paying intense attention to the natural world around him.
Philosophically, Hopkins was influenced by the medieval thinker Duns Scotus, who taught that each created thing has its own unique “thisness” (haecceitas)—what Hopkins called “inscape.” Every kestrel, every stone, every moment has its own particular way of reflecting divine glory. The poem remained unpublished until 1918, when Hopkins’s friend Robert Bridges finally released a collection of his work. By then, the world was ready for Hopkins’s radical approach.
It is worth remembering the times: Darwin’s theories had shaken Victorian faith, and science seemed to challenge religion at every turn. Hopkins’s poem insists that nature does not lead away from God—it leads directly to Him.
Point of View
The speaker in “The Windhover” is intensely personal—almost certainly Hopkins himself. The voice is that of a priest-observer who has a sudden, overwhelming experience of beauty and meaning.
The poem begins with “I caught this morning”—immediately placing us in a specific moment, in a particular consciousness. This is not abstract philosophy; it is lived experience.
What is fascinating is how the perspective shifts. At first, the speaker is simply watching: “High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing.” He is on the ground, looking up, tracking the bird’s movements with his eyes.
Then comes a crucial revelation:
“My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird.”
The speaker is no longer just observing—he has been changed by what he sees. His hidden heart (perhaps hidden even from himself, certainly hidden from the world) suddenly comes alive.
This phrase, “heart in hiding,” is significant. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins lived a life of obedience and self-denial. His role required him to hide his own desires and ambitions. Yet here, the bird’s beauty breaks through that hiding, stirring something deep and true.
By the end, the perspective becomes almost prophetic. The speaker is not just describing what he saw; he is interpreting it, teaching from it:
“No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine.”
He has moved from witness to wisdom-giver.
This evolution mirrors spiritual growth itself—from seeing, to feeling, to understanding, to teaching. The personal becomes universal.
Mood and Tone
The emotional atmosphere of “The Windhover” is joyful, intense, and reverential—like witnessing something that takes your breath away.
The first eight lines build a mood of exhilaration. The kestrel is in “ecstasy,” and the speaker shares that ecstasy. Words pile up energetically: “kingdom,” “dauphin,” “riding,” “striding,” “swing.” The excitement and almost breathless wonder are palpable.
But there is complexity here. When the speaker says “My heart in hiding / Stirred,” we feel a touch of longing, even sadness. Why is his heart in hiding? What has kept it concealed? The joy is absolute, but it is tinged with the ache of someone who has not allowed himself to feel fully for a long time.
The tone throughout is devotional—this is, after all, a poem dedicated “To Christ our Lord.” Hopkins writes with the fervour of someone in prayer. The exclamations—“O my chevalier!”—are not casual; they are cries of worship.
Yet Hopkins never becomes heavy or sermon-like. His tone has energy, even a hint of playfulness. The language bounces and leaps. There is athletic vigour in lines like “then off, off forth on swing.”
The final lines shift toward something gentler: “ah my dear.” That phrase has enormous tenderness. The excitement softens into a kind of loving, accepting affection—an awareness that sacrifice and suffering form part of glory.
All in all, the poem can be described as a spiritual ascent, though one which has to be earned: it is pure joy that is thoroughly cognizant of the cost of beauty.
Theme
In its most basic sense, the poem The Windhover explores the revelation of divine glory in the natural world, and it suggests that genuine beauty often comes as a result of sacrifice.
Nature as Revelation: The kestrel is not just a bird; it is a window onto an eternal reality. Hopkins argued that every created thing has a specific essence, or what he called inscape, which reveals the essence of God. By seeing—by attentively seeing—a phenomenon, he experiences the divine.
Majesty and Sacrifice: The bird demonstrates “brute beauty and valour and act”—raw, physical magnificence. It is a king of the air, mastering the wind. This represents Christ’s glory, His sovereignty, His power. But Hopkins does not stop there. The poem’s second half introduces images of ploughing and falling embers—humble, even painful images. This is the paradox of Christianity: true glory comes through sacrifice. The plough that cuts the earth shines. The ember that falls and breaks open reveals gold and vermilion fire.
Hidden Grace: The speaker’s “heart in hiding” suggests that divine encounter can surprise us. We wall ourselves off, go through routines, protect ourselves—and then something breaks through. Grace arrives unexpectedly, stirring what we thought was settled.
Humble Work: There is a profound message in the lines about the plough:
“shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine.”
Ordinary labour, done faithfully, creates its own beauty. Hopkins is not romanticizing suffering, but he is saying that showing up, doing the work, enduring the friction—this too reveals glory. It is a theme particularly meaningful for Hopkins, whose life as a priest involved much routine duty and little recognition.
Transformation: The repeated imagery of fire—“the fire that breaks from thee,” “gash gold-vermilion”—suggests transformation. Something hard becomes something radiant. Pain becomes beauty. This is the alchemy of faith, where even breaking can be a kind of breaking-open, releasing light.
These themes work together to create a rich theology: the world is charged with divine presence, and we encounter it not by escaping ordinary life but by engaging it fully—with attention, with courage, and with a willingness to be changed.
Summary
“The Windhover” is a Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet, meaning it has fourteen lines divided into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines).
The Octave (Lines 1–8): The Vision
Lines 1–2:
“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding.”
Early in the morning, the speaker spots a kestrel. He calls it “morning’s minion” (morning’s favourite servant) and “kingdom of daylight’s dauphin” (the heir to daylight’s kingdom). The bird is “dapple-dawn-drawn”—drawn out by the speckled dawn—and it is riding through the air like a knight on horseback.
Lines 3–4:
“Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing.”
The bird soars over rolling countryside, held up by steady air currents. High in the sky, it circles like a horse controlled by reins, its wings rippling (wimpling means forming folds or ripples).
Lines 5–6:
“In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding.”
The bird is in a state of pure joy, pure being. Then suddenly it launches forward, swinging through the air. Hopkins compares its motion to an ice skater making a smooth arc—there is a combination of forceful movement (“hurl”) and effortless grace (“gliding”).
Lines 7–8:
“Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!”
The bird effortlessly pushes back against strong winds. Watching this, the speaker’s hidden heart—concealed until now—is moved, stirred to life. He is amazed by what the bird achieves, by its complete mastery.
The Sestet (Lines 9–14): The Revelation
Lines 9–11:
“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!”
Now Hopkins addresses the bird and everything it represents—raw beauty, courage, action, sky, pride, feathers. Then comes the crucial word: “Buckle!” This word has multiple meanings: to join together, to collapse, and to prepare for battle. When these qualities come together (or perhaps when they bend or break), fire bursts forth—something infinitely more beautiful and more dangerous. He calls the bird (and by extension, Christ) “my chevalier”—my knight.
Lines 12–14:
“No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”
The speaker realizes this should not come as a surprise to us. Simple, hard ploughing makes the ploughshare shine as it cuts furrows in the field. Similarly, cold, dying embers—when they fall and break open (“gall themselves” means to chafe or wound)—reveal gorgeous gold and red colours inside.
The message: glory comes not just from soaring but from faithful labour and even from breaking.
Gist of the Poem
“The Windhover” captures a moment of revelation. The speaker watches a kestrel mastering the morning air and sees in that mastery something that reminds him of Christ—powerful, beautiful, sovereign. But the poem does not stop at admiration for power.
The second half reveals a more profound truth: real beauty and glory often emerge from humble and difficult work. The plough that cuts the earth shines. The ember that breaks open reveals fire.
Hopkins is saying that divine presence reveals itself not just in spectacular moments, but in ordinary faithfulness, in willing sacrifice, and in the friction of daily life. The bird’s effortless mastery is glorious, yes—but so is the hard shine of a well-used tool, so is the burst of colour from a dying coal.
It is a poem about attention, about really seeing, and about discovering that everything—absolutely everything—can reveal beauty if we look with eyes of faith.
How the Poem Develops
“The Windhover” follows a classic sonnet structure, and Hopkins uses that structure with great skill.
The octave (first eight lines) is full of forward motion. It describes the bird’s flight in increasingly energetic language. The rhythm speeds up, the images pile on top of each other, and the excitement builds. We move from simply seeing the bird to being stirred by it. This section is about ascent—physical ascent of the bird, spiritual ascent of the speaker’s soul.
Then comes the volta (the turn) at line 9. Suddenly, the tone shifts. We are no longer describing the bird’s flight; we are interpreting its meaning. The word “Buckle!” acts as a hinge, a moment of transformation.
The sestet (final six lines) brings us down to earth—literally. After watching a bird in the sky, we are now thinking about ploughs and furrows, about embers falling. But this descent is not a disappointment. It is a deepening. Hopkins is saying that the same glory exists here, in earthly work and sacrifice.
This movement from sky to earth mirrors the Incarnation itself—God descending into the physical world. The poem’s structure enacts its theology.
Hopkins’s technique amplifies this development. His enjambments (lines that run into each other without pause) in the octave create breathless momentum. In the sestet, although there is still energy, pauses allow for more reflection. The syntax becomes more complex, asking us to slow down and think.
The final image—embers gushing gold and vermilion—brings everything together. It is beautiful and violent, glorious and painful, ending and revealing. The poem does not resolve into simple harmony but into paradox: dying produces life, breaking produces beauty.
Type of Poem
“The Windhover” is a devotional sonnet—a poem of religious praise and worship.
More specifically, it is a nature lyric with Christological significance. Hopkins takes a natural observation and transforms it into a theological meditation. The poem is personal (it is about “I” and “my”), intense (filled with emotion and exclamation), and directed toward God.
It shares qualities with metaphysical poetry—the tradition of John Donne and George Herbert—where physical images become elaborate vehicles for spiritual meaning. But Hopkins is also distinctly Victorian and distinctly Catholic, bringing a sacramental vision (the idea that bodily things can convey spiritual grace) to English poetry in a new way.
Form and Structure
Hopkins chose the Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet form, which consists of:
- An octave (8 lines) with rhyme scheme ABBAABBA
- A sestet (6 lines) with rhyme scheme CDCDCD (or variations like CDECDE)wikipedia
This form traditionally presents a problem or situation in the octave, then offers resolution or commentary in the sestet after the volta (turn). Hopkins follows this pattern closely.
The octave shows us the bird and builds emotional intensity. The sestet, after “Buckle!”, interprets the meaning and extends it to broader truths. What makes Hopkins’s sonnet unusual is how he pushes against the form’s constraints. His sentences spill over line breaks (enjambment), his rhythms are irregular, and his syntax is compressed almost to the breaking point. The tight sonnet form contains barely controllable energy, which is precisely the point. The poem enacts the tension between control and ecstasy, form and freedom.
Versification
This is where Hopkins revolutionized English poetry.
Traditional English verse counts syllables and follows patterns like iambic pentameter (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM). Hopkins challenged this by creating what he called “sprung rhythm.”
In sprung rhythm, what matters is stressed syllables, not total syllables. Each line has a set number of strong beats (usually four), but the number of weak syllables can vary widely. This creates a rhythm that is closer to natural speech, closer to the rhythms of music, closer to the way a bird actually moves through the air.The-Windhover1.docxebsco
Look at line 1: “I CAUGHT this MORNing MORNing’s MINion, KING-”
There are four intense stresses, but the syllables between them vary. The line bounces, surges, and feels alive.
Hopkins also uses:
- Alliteration: repetition of consonant sounds (“dapple-dawn-drawn,” “brute beauty and valour”)
- Assonance: repetition of vowel sounds (“rolling level”)
- Internal rhyme: rhymes within lines, not just at line ends
- Compound words: “dapple-dawn-drawn,” “blue-bleak”—compressed combinations that pack multiple meanings together
The result is poetry that sounds unlike anything written before. It is muscular, energetic, sometimes hard to parse on first reading—but it captures motion and emotion in ways that regular metre never could.
Language and Literary Devices
Hopkins’s language is dense, unusual, and powerful. He mixes Old English words with Latinate vocabulary, creates new compound words, and arranges syntax in unexpected ways.
Key Literary Devices:
Metaphor:
- The kestrel as “morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin”—the bird becomes royalty, heir to light itself.
- The plough as Christ-figure—its cutting and shining represent sacrifice and glory.
- Embers as revelation—what seems dying actually contains hidden fire.
Simile:
- “As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend”—comparing the bird’s flight to an ice skater’s graceful arc, capturing both power and elegance.
Allusion:
- Biblical echoes throughout: Christ as knight (chevalier), as king, as sacrifice.
- Falconry language from medieval chivalric tradition.
- The “fire” recalls Pentecost, the Holy Spirit’s descent.
Personification:
- The wind is “big” and can be “rebuffed”—given personality and strength.
- Air, pride, and plume are commanded to “Buckle!”—treated as beings that can act.
- Embers “gall themselves”—as if they choose their own transformation.
Imagery
Hopkins creates vivid sensory experiences:
- Visual: “dapple-dawn,” “wimpling wing,” “gold-vermilion”
- Kinetic: “hurl and gliding,” “striding,” “swing”
- Tactile: “Rebuffed the big wind,” “gash”
Symbolism:
- Kestrel = Christ (sovereign, hovering between heaven and earth)
- Plough/furrow = sacrifice, redemptive suffering
- Fire = divine presence, the Holy Spirit’s transforming power
- Dawn = renewal, new creation
Compound Words (Kennings): Hopkins creates compressed images by joining words:
- “dapple-dawn-drawn” combines speckled light, morning, and attraction.
- “blue-bleak” fuses colour and emotional temperature.
- “gold-vermilion” combines two rich colours to suggest transcendent beauty.
These devices work together to create layers of meaning. Every word serves multiple purposes, and every image connects to others.
Memorable Lines
“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin” (Lines 1–2)
This opening announces the poem’s royal metaphor. The speaker has not just seen a bird—he has “caught” (like catching sight of, but also capturing in awareness) a figure of nobility. The enjambment splits “king-dom” across lines, making us feel the extension of sovereignty. “Minion” means beloved servant, “dauphin” means heir. The bird serves morning and inherits daylight—it belongs to beauty itself.
“My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!” (Lines 7–8)
This is the emotional core. The speaker’s heart has been hidden—from the world, perhaps from himself. Years of priestly discipline may have taught him to suppress spontaneous joy. But the bird’s mastery breaks through that hiding, stirring what was dormant. The dashes convey breathlessness, stumbling over words in amazement. “The achieve of… the mastery of…” He can barely articulate what he is feeling.
“Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle!” (Lines 9–10)
This is the poem’s hinge. Hopkins lists the bird’s qualities in a rush—raw beauty, courage, action—then commands: “Buckle!” The word means multiple things: come together, collapse, and prepare. It is the moment of transformation, where all these elements combine or give way to reveal something greater.
“No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine” (Lines 12–13)
This is the volta’s wisdom. After all the excitement about the bird, Hopkins says we should not be surprised. Simple, faithful work—the “sheer plod” of ploughing—makes the ploughshare gleam. Glory is not reserved for spectacular moments. It emerges from ordinary dedication. This line has comforted countless readers who live lives of duty rather than drama.
“Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion” (Line 14)
This is the poem’s final image. Dying embers fall and break open, revealing gorgeous colours within. “Gall” means to wound, “gash” means to cut. The violence of the language is striking—but that violence releases beauty. It is Hopkins’s final word on the paradox of Christian glory: breaking produces revelation, wounds produce light.
Critical Analysis
“The Windhover” represents Hopkins at his most brilliant—a poem where technical innovation and spiritual vision are perfectly fused.
Form and Structure
Hopkins’s use of the Petrarchan sonnet is both traditional and revolutionary. The form itself—octave and sestet divided by a volta—mirrors the poem’s movement from earthly observation to heavenly interpretation. But Hopkins strains against the form’s boundaries. His enjambments refuse to respect line breaks. His syntax twists and delays resolution. The tight container holds explosive energy.
The sprung rhythm liberates the verse. Instead of the steady march of iambic pentameter, we get surging, variable rhythms that feel like flight itself. Lines like “Of the rolling level underneath him steady air” have an undulating quality, rising and falling. This is not just description—it is enactment. The form becomes what it describes.
Theological Depth
Hopkins brings a distinctly Catholic sacramental vision to English poetry. For him, the physical world is not separate from the spiritual—it is saturated with it. Every created thing has “inscape” (its unique essential nature) that reveals divine creativity.
This is influenced by the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, who emphasized the “thisness” (haecceitas) of particular things. God is found not in abstraction but in the specific: this kestrel, this morning, this light.
The poem’s Christology is sophisticated. The bird represents Christ in His glory—sovereign, masterful, beautiful. But the sestet complicates this. Hopkins refuses to stop at triumphalism. He insists that Christ’s glory is inseparable from His suffering. The plough that shines has cut the earth. The ember that glows has fallen and broken.
This is the theology of the Crucifixion: glory through sacrifice, life through death, beauty through brokenness. Hopkins does not explain this in doctrinal terms—he shows it in images so compressed they demand meditation.
Imagery and Compression
The poem’s power comes partly from its density. Hopkins packs enormous meaning into small spaces. Take “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon”—three hyphenated words that contain: the speckled quality of early light, the time of day, the bird’s attraction to or emergence from that light, and the species identification. It is almost impossibly compressed.
This compression can make Hopkins difficult. Readers struggle with syntax that does not follow expected patterns, with vocabulary that mixes archaisms and neologisms. But difficulty is part of the point. Divine reality is not easy to grasp. It requires attention, patience, and wrestling.
The imagery works through accumulation. Royal language (“minion,” “dauphin,” “chevalier”), falconry terms (“rung upon the rein”), natural observation (“wimpling wing”), craft imagery (“plough,” “sillion”), metallurgical imagery (“embers,” “fire”)—all these registers combine to create a world that is simultaneously medieval, Victorian, eternal, and utterly present.
Critical Perspectives
Formalist critics praise the poem’s technical mastery. The sprung rhythm, the sonic effects, the close matching of form to content—these make “The Windhover” an exemplary case of how poetic technique can create meaning.
Religious critics explore its Christological symbolism and Ignatian spirituality. The poem exemplifies the Jesuit practice of “finding God in all things,” turning ordinary observation into contemplation.
Ecocritical readers view Hopkins as an early nature poet, one who valued the nonhuman world for its own sake (not just as a symbol) and whose concept of “inscape” anticipates modern environmental consciousness.
Psychological approaches focus on the “heart in hiding”—reading the poem as dramatizing Hopkins’s inner conflicts between duty and desire, between priestly obedience and poetic vocation, between self-suppression and self-expression.
Feminist critics have noted the aggressive, even violent imagery (“gash,” “buckle,” “rebuffed”), seeing in it either masculine energy or a problematic association of glory with domination.
Influence and Innovation
Hopkins influenced modernist poets tremendously, even though they did not read him until the 1918 publication of his poems. T. S. Eliot’s fragmented syntax, Dylan Thomas’s rhythmic intensity, and the compression of Imagism all have roots in techniques that Hopkins pioneered.ebsco
He liberated poetry from metrical rigidity, showing that rhythms could be organic, speech-based, and still patterned. He demonstrated that difficulty could be purposeful, that making readers work could produce richer meaning.
Yet Hopkins remains unique. No one else sounds quite like him. His fusion of intense physicality with intense spirituality, of Victorian earnestness with modernist experimentation, creates a voice all its own.
Relevance to Modern Poetry
Hopkins’s influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry is profound and ongoing.
Direct Influence on Major Poets
- T.S. Eliot drew inspiration from Hopkins’s compression and his use of complex syntax to convey spiritual struggle. The “fragments” of The Waste Land and the meditative intensity of Four Quartets both show Hopkins’s impact.
- Dylan Thomas took Hopkins’s rhythmic energy and pushed it further, creating his own surging, alliterative style. Thomas’s nature imagery and sense of wonder have evident roots in Hopkins.
- W.H. Auden admired Hopkins’s technical virtuosity and his ability to be both deeply religious and formally innovative.
Liberation of Form
Hopkins proved that poetry did not have to follow strict metrical patterns to be powerful. This opened the door for free verse, allowing poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams to write in the rhythms of natural speech.
Yet Hopkins never abandoned pattern entirely—he created new patterns. This balance between structure and freedom has had a deep influence. Poets learned they could be experimental without being formless.
Nature Poetry
Contemporary nature poets and ecopoets draw heavily on Hopkins. Mary Oliver’s attention to small moments of natural beauty, and her sense that an encounter with nature is a spiritual encounter, stand in direct continuity with Hopkins.
Seamus Heaney, especially in his Irish rural imagery, learned from Hopkins how to ground spiritual experience in physical detail, how to take a local observation and make it universal without losing its particularity.
Confessional Poetry
Hopkins’s “heart in hiding” anticipated the confessional poetry movement’s exploration of inner life. Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell wrote decades later, but Hopkins showed that poetry could dramatize psychological complexity, that the speaker’s inner state could be as important as external description.
Religious Poetry
For contemporary religious poets, Hopkins remains a standard. He demonstrated that faith-based poetry does not have to be sentimental or simplistic; spiritual experience can be ecstatic, complex, doubt-filled, and formally sophisticated all at once.
Deviations from Predecessors
Hopkins broke from his Victorian predecessors in crucial ways:
- Against Wordsworth and Romantic nature poetry: Where Romantics often saw nature as a source of calm, moral lessons, or sublime distance, Hopkins found ecstasy, particularity, and divine presence. His nature is more Catholic than pantheist, more energetic than serene.
- Against Tennyson’s polish: Victorian poetry often prized smoothness, regular metre, and elevated diction. Hopkins embraced roughness, irregular rhythms, and mixed registers—combining Anglo-Saxon bluntness with Latinate elaboration.
- Against Victorian doubt: While many Victorian poets (Tennyson, Arnold) wrestled with faith’s erosion, Hopkins wrote from within certainty—though a certainty that knew struggle and sacrifice.
- Toward Modernism: Hopkins anticipated modernist fragmentation, compression, and difficulty. His syntax breaks expectations. His images do not always connect logically. He demands active reading. Yet unlike many modernists, his worldview remains integrated, coherent, and faith-based.
Conclusion
“The Windhover” endures because it does something essential: it shows us how to see.
Hopkins takes a moment that could pass unremarked—a bird hovering in morning light—and reveals its depths. Through technical brilliance, spiritual insight, and sheer linguistic energy, he transforms observation into revelation.
The poem teaches that divine glory is not distant or abstract. It is here, in the natural world, in ordinary work, in moments of surprising beauty. But seeing it requires attention. It requires that we stop, look carefully, and allow ourselves to be stirred.
What makes the poem great is how it holds opposites together without resolving them into easy harmony. Mastery and sacrifice. Beauty and violence. Soaring and plodding. Glory and humility. Hopkins refuses to choose between these—he shows how they are connected, how one leads to the other.
The form itself enacts this. Tight sonnet structure contains wild energy. Careful pattern produces a spontaneous feeling. Difficulty rewards effort.
For readers today, “The Windhover” remains startlingly relevant. In an age of distraction, it models deep attention. In a culture of consumption, it insists that real value comes through sacrifice. In a time of environmental crisis, it demonstrates reverent engagement with the nonhuman world. In an era of religious uncertainty, it shows how faith can be both intellectually rigorous and emotionally overwhelming.
Hopkins offers no easy comfort, but he offers something better: a vision of a world charged with meaning, where every particular thing—every kestrel, every ember, every furrow—can burst into flame if we have eyes to see it.
The poem’s final image stays with us: something falling, breaking open, revealing gold and vermilion fire. It is an image of transformation, of hidden beauty revealed through breaking. It suggests that our own fallings, our own breakings, might release unexpected light.
“The Windhover” is less a poem to understand than an experience to undergo. Each reading can stir the heart anew. Each encounter can teach us again to catch morning’s minion, to let beauty buckle us, to trust that even in our plodding, something shines.
Hopkins dedicated it “To Christ our Lord,” but he gives it to all of us—an invitation to find glory not somewhere else but right here, right now, in the dangerous loveliness of the created world.