Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Windhover

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

Hovering mechanics

**Rung upon the rein** borrows from horses—the falcon circles on air currents like a rider controlling a mount. **Wimpling** means rippling, like a nun's veil in wind.

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstacy! 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

The crisis verb

**Buckle** can mean either 'collapse under pressure' or 'clasp together like armor.' Hopkins wants both—the moment beauty and discipline fuse, or break into something greater.

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Hopkins's Sprung Rhythm

Hopkins invented sprung rhythm to escape the tick-tock of Victorian meter. Instead of counting syllables, count stresses—each line has roughly five beats, but they can crowd together or spread apart. Read > "I caught this morning morning's minion" with four stresses hammering in five words. Then > "Of the rolling level underneath him steady air" stretches the same number of beats across nine words.

CONTEXT Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who stopped publishing poetry when he took orders in 1868. He wrote this in 1877 but it wasn't published until 1918, nearly 30 years after his death. His editor Robert Bridges thought the rhythm too radical for Victorian readers.

The compound words do double work: dapple-dawn-drawn crams three observations (the falcon's coloring, the time of day, what lured it out) into one hyphenated rush. This compression creates the breathless speed of watching the bird. Hopkins called these packed moments inscape—the essential pattern that makes a thing itself and not something else.

What "Buckle" Actually Means

Line 10's > "Buckle!" is the most debated verb in Victorian poetry. Buckle as collapse: all that brute beauty and valor might break under pressure. Buckle as clasp: like a knight fastening armor, the bird's qualities join together. Hopkins likely meant both simultaneously.

The poem dedicates itself > "To Christ our Lord" but waits until line 10 to make the turn explicit with > "O my chevalier!" (French for knight). The falcon becomes Christ the warrior-knight, and the fire that breaks from him is the Incarnation—God's glory revealed through physical stress, through buckling.

The final three lines prove this with two examples: the plough blade shines when it's doing its hardest work (cutting earth), and embers glow gold-vermillion when they fall and break apart. Hopkins is arguing that stress reveals hidden glory—the falcon's beauty emerges in the difficult hover, Christ's divinity blazes brightest at the Crucifixion. > "Fall, gall themselves, and gash" uses three violent verbs for embers, but the result is gold-vermillion, the colors of dawn and of sacred art.