The Windhover - Gerard Manley Hopkins
Today I woke up thinking about Yeats's falcon in his widening gyre, and how "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". And then I got to thinking that perhaps I'd look for a more upbeat falcon poem. And I found "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest, who worked with what he called "sprung rhythm", which was based in early Anglo-Saxon rhythms involving the placement of stressed syllables within a line and relying in part of repetition of words and sounds within a line. Rather than using iambic pentameter or any other fixed metre, his lines vary in length and placement of stressed syllables (akin to accentual verse), giving them a unique, organic feel and foreshadowing the coming of free verse.
If you have a few moments, read this one aloud, and you'll get the feel for what Hopkins was up to with his craft. Despite the length of the lines, this poem takes the form of a sonnet: it's 14-lines long, and it uses the rhyme form ABBAABBA CDC DCD.
The Windhover
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.
*sillion: thick body of soil that has been turned over by the plough
If you have a few moments, read this one aloud, and you'll get the feel for what Hopkins was up to with his craft. Despite the length of the lines, this poem takes the form of a sonnet: it's 14-lines long, and it uses the rhyme form ABBAABBA CDC DCD.
The Windhover
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.
*sillion: thick body of soil that has been turned over by the plough