Attemp a criritical appreciation
of The Windhover.
The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins is a semi-romantic,
religious poem dedicated to Christ. It is a usual Hopkinsian sonnet that begins
with description of nature and ends in meditation about God and Christ and his
beauty, greatness and grace. The poem also uses his usual “sprung rhythm”,
Anglo-Saxon diction, alliteration, internal rhyming, new compound metaphors,
elliptical grammar and complex threads of connotation.
Hopkins has mixed his romantic fascination with the nature
with his religious favor of gratitude towards God for giving us a beautiful
nature. The beauty of nature is here illustrated by a wonderful bird flying in
the air. He describes a bird which he saw flying in the sky that morning. Like
in a romantic poem, he remembers the experience to express his feelings. That
morning, the speaker had been out at dawn. From the excited description in the
poem, we can infer that the speaker was probably in the field. His attention
was suddenly drawn by the scene of a bird flying in the sky.
The first stanza of the poem is a description of the different tricks of the bird’s flight. In the second the speaker remembers the beauty of Christ and says that he is a billion times lovelier. So, claiming that the nature’s beauty is no wonder, he concludes in the last stanza that everything he looks at reminds him the pain and suffering of Christ which has made human life so beautiful and given this opportunity to enjoy it. To this devotee of Christ, everything brings the image of Christ and his wounds and pain and sacrifice. This suggests that he always remembers and becomes thankful to Christ. As the subtitle suggests, the poem is a thanksgiving to Christ.
