Gerard Manley Hopkins
Page 359 "The Windhover"
1. Paraphrase "The Windhover" given the following definitions. If one word has more than one meaning which applies to the poem, see if you can incorporate those multiple meanings into your paraphrase.
minion: 1. an esteemed favorite; 2. a follower ; 3. a syncophant
dauphin: The eldest son of the king of France
dapple: mottled or spotted marking, as on a horse's skin
"rung upon the rein": the act of standing and holding on to a horse's reins while leading him in a circle
wimpling: 1. curving, 2. pleated, 3. rippling or undulating (see note on p. 335)
plume: a large, ornamental feather; a token of honor or achievement; (verb) to decorate, to smooth oneself, to congratulate oneself.
buckle: 1. to bend or crumple; 2. to collapse; 3. to yield or surrender to another's authority. 4. to prepare for action (archaic: to buckle up for battle); 5. to fasten or clasp together.
chevalier: a member of certain orders of knighthood in France
sheer: to swerve or cause to swerve: the upward curve of a ship's hull as observed from the side; thin, fine & transparent; undilulted & pure; almost perpendicularly.
plod: to walk laboriously; to work perserveringly; to trudge slowly.
sillion: the space between furrowed rows
bleak: exposed to the elements; unsheltered; raw; gloomy & somber;
gall: to make sore by abrasion; to break the surface as if by friction; to exasperate; to become irrirated, chafed or sore
vermillion: a color between a bright red and a reddish orange.
2. Biography
Hopkins (1844-1889) was an Oxford-educated Jesuit preaching in an England dominated by the Anglican Church. Given this, speculate as to his motivations for writing this poem.
3. Analysis of the Windhover
Questions to consider as we discuss the poem:
a. The How and Why of Obscurity: Why did Hopkins write poems so difficult to understand? What makes his poetry so difficult, even more so than the strange and archaic vocabulary? Do these same qualities in any way enhance the poetry?
b. The Explosive Moment: Is there one word at which the poem pivots? Look at the slowest line rhythmically and see if it is followed by a fast line. Look for a word that has multiple meanings. Is this like the cracking of a whip?
c. Poem as Means of Conversion: In the Bible, what saint experiences an "explosive" conversion?
Writing Exercise: Try to write something that is difficult to understand. Use strange words and inverted syntax. Make strange connections between things (connecting metaphor to metaphor). If possible, make it musical with a heavy use of assonance, alliteration, end rhyme, internal rhyme and rhythm.
Summary of "The Windhover"
€ In "The Windhover," Hopkins compares Christ to a hawk that hovers and, in a sudden, explosive moment, dives for its prey. He tells us that the beauty of this hawk, of Christ, is ineffable &emdash; beyond language &emdash; and adds, further, that this shouldn't surprise us, because even ordinary, natural acts, like a plow shining itself as it goes down a field or a coal breaking open to reveal its orange flames and sparks, have a beauty beyond language and reveal Christ to us.
€ The real trick of this poem is how Hopkins intentionally makes it difficult to the point of obscurity, in order to keep us guessing. He wants us to read and reread this poem until it explodes into meaning for us. He wants to communicate to us this way because he wants to us to become used to explosive moments. Why? Because, as a Jesuit priest in an Anglican country, he hoped to convert his readers through his poetry. He hoped that by experiencing the explosive meaning in poetry, readers would be more open to feeling the explosive presence of Christ as He comes to us, and as He came to St. Paul on his road to Damascus.
€ Hopkins uses several devices to obscure meaning and to prepare us for this explosive moment. These methods include:
1) overlapping metaphors: Christ is a hawk, servant, favored one, king, horse, skater, plow, and ember.
All these metaphors come at the reader one by one, creating a slow explosion of meaning.
2) inverted syntax: dapple-daw-drawn falcon = a falcon drawn by the dappled dawn.
3) sound devices: by making his poetry thick with assonance, alliteration, and rhyme, Hopkins both makes it more difficult for us to easily read his poetry and adds a denseness to it.
4) his rhythm: Hopkins defines calls it "sprung rhythm." Rather than writing in iambic pentameter, he tried to write in a way that captured "God's rhythms" and the rhythms of natural speech. In scanning his poetry, Hopkins wants us to only count the stressed syllables and ignore all the unstressed ones. He uses sprung rhythm in "The Windhover" to spring a trap, slowly building up to the explosive moment of the hawk's dive, of Christ's descent into our hearts.
5) compactness of language: Hopkins eliminates many small words to pack his poetry tightly into itself.
6) multivalence: like compactness of language, Hopkins uses individual words with great economy, hoping to employ their multiple meanings. All the definitions of buckle apply and all explode once into meaning.
7) punctuation: with strange punctuation, especially with hyphenation, Hopkins slows us down and shows us how all of nature is tied together and points to Christ.
8) archaic and unusual words: they slow us down and create a new music for the reader, helping us see the old and familiar in new ways
9) portmanteau words: (two words joined together for the first time) "shivelight and shadowtackle"
€ Hopkins also points the metaphors in on each other and outward to Christ. Christ is a follower and servant (of God's) a prince, a skater who creates his own path, a beautiful bird that stirs our hearts with longing, admiration and fear. Similarly, the plow recalls the image of the hawk plowing down through the air and it foreshadows the image of the embers. Imagine a plow cutting through dirt, breaking off sparks as it hits and splits open rocks. These "blue-bleak embers" not only point to the dirt clods that the plow breaks, but to the hawk, with its blue bleak head and red tail feathers, and also to Christ, who fell on his way to the cross, who galled himself (through his crucifixion) and whose blood "gashed gold vermilion."
Theme: All the world is a sign of God's love for us as evidenced in Christ's presence in all the natural world &emdash; from hawks to horses &emdash; and in human actions, such as plowing and skating. All we need are eyes to see Christ's presence and we will be converted to Him.
Hopkins had a word for this divine presence: inscape. He claims that if you stare at a tree long enough, you will see its interior organization. It will suddenly make sense to you and reveal its unique self. In proclaiming its individuality, it also points to its commonality with all other God-created things.
Pied Beauty (p. 85)
pied: patchy in color; splotched; piebald
dapple: mottled or spoted marking, as on a horse's skin
stipple: the effect produced by drawing, engraving or painting in dots or short strokes; to dot, fleck or speckle
fold, fallow & plow: the three stages of cultivation, fold = ready for cultivation; fallow = field overgrown with weeds; plow = field plowed up ready for planting.
Writing Exercise: Write a poem which lists things that share the same quality, whether it be beauty or ugliness; at the end, make a point about them.
God's Grandeur (p. 147) & "As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame" (handout)
I. Hopkins wrote the following about the first few lines of this poem: "All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, riong and tell of him." Regarding "shook foil," he writes: "I mean foil in its sense of leaf or tinsel. . . . Shaken goldfoil gives off broad glares like sheet lightning and also, and this is true of nothing else, owing to its zigzag dints and creasings and network of small many cornered facets, a sort of fork lightning too." The "ooze of oil" refers to the crushing of olives.
reck: to take heed of or to have caution
rod: a stick used for punishment; a scepter or staff symbolizing power or authority; a lightning rod; a divining rod.
shod: covered with a shoe.
bent: not straight, crooked; determined; the limit of endurance.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked° string tells, each hung bell's °plucked
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves&emdash;goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is&emdash;
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
"Selves" = a verb meaning "to fulfill one's own individuality
"justices" = acts in a godly manner, lives fully energized by grace, justice and sanctity
This poem summarizes the philosophy of the Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus (1265-1308?), whose writings greatly influenced Hopkins. Scotus believed that individual substances, according to the metaphysical richness of their being, make up one vast hierarchy with God as their summit. He also believed that individuality is the "final perfection" of any creature; that the individual is immediately knowable by the intellect in union with the sense; and that in man the Will, as the active principle of individuality has primacy over the Intellect. In other words, we intuit, rather than deduce, God in the perfection of individual objects. Also, even though individual objects participate in the being of God through their individuality, they also share a common nature with God. These objects are made perfect by God's Will. When you perceive this Will, you perceive its inscape. Hopkins tried to give his poetry these same qualities of individuality and communion with God and he hoped that readers could sense their inscape.
Writing Exercise: Write a poem which is heavily laden with sound device. If possible, make everything contain alliteration, assonance or rhyme.
Spring & Fall (p. 357)
Márgarét are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights coler
By and by, nor spare a sight
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
wanwood: a portmanteau word with "wan" having two meanings: bloodless; dark.
leafmeal: a portmanteau word probably meaning the mealy substance leaves make as they rot
ghost: here used to meaning "spirit" as in "spirit of the living" rather than that of the dead.
1. Why the title?
2. How old do you think Margaret is?
3. Untangle lines 3 & 4. Write this down in ordinary syntax and feel free to paraphrase or to omit or include words
4. What does "nor spare a sigh" mean?
5. What image is created with "sorrows springs"?
6. We don't know about our death through which two means? How do we know about our own death?
7. Do you feel you were born for "blight"? What possible positive meaning can you extract from these last two lines? Are we simply born to die?
Poem 64 (Carrion Comfort)
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist&emdash;slack they may be&emdash;these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there, me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? that my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed th rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Poem 65
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, pitch/throw; to put in position; to set the level
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. of; to set in a particular musical key; to
Comforter, where, where is your comforting? plunge.
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? wring: to twist & squeeze; to extract
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief- Comforter: the Holy Spirit
woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing&emdash; main: relating to a continuous stretch of
Then lull, then leave off, Fury had shrieked 'No ling- land or water (obs.); physical strength
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'. force: short for perforce (by necessity)
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall durance: short for endurance
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
Poem 67
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent dead letter: a letter that never arrives and
To dearest him that lives alas! away. which is stored in a post office.
I am gall. I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Writing Exercise: Think about the most depressing moment of your life. Write a poem which captures those feelings and the details of your situation then. Or, write a poem about your own death. Write about where you will be, who will be near you, how you will die and what you will think about. Will you feel regret or satisfaction? What do you want to have accomplished by the time you die?
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