The Full Text of “The Windhover”
To Christ our Lord
1I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
2 dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
3 Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
4High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
5In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
6 As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
7 Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
8Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
9Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
10 Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
11Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
12 No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
13Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
14 Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
The Full Text of “The Windhover”
To Christ our Lord
1I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
2 dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
3 Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
4High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
5In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
6 As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
7 Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
8Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
9Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
10 Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
11Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
12 No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
13Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
14 Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
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“The Windhover” Introduction
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"The Windhover" is a sonnet written in 1887 by the English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, dedicated to "Christ our Lord." In the poem, the speaker recounts the awe-inspiring sight of a kestrel (a.k.a, a "windhover") soaring through the air in search of prey. The speaker is deeply moved by the bird's aerial skill—its ability to both hover in stillness and swoop down with speed—and sees the bird as an expression of the beauty and majesty of God's creation. The poem's octet (the first eight lines) concentrates primarily on the bird, while the sestet—the second and final section of the poem—discusses the creature in a wider religious context. The speaker ultimately stresses that such beauty is in fact "no wonder," because all of God's creation is divinely beautiful.
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“The Windhover” Summary
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This morning I was lucky enough to see a flying falcon, which seemed to me to be the morning's favorite creature, a prince of daylight with speckled feathers. He was riding the rolling air currents way up high. He seemed full of pure joy as he controlled the wind like a horse-rider does a horse. After hovering almost motionless, the bird suddenly dove in a smooth arc, like that of a skater's heel cleaning sweeping across the ice. The way the bird dove and glided revealed its authority over the strong wind. Watching the bird moved me profoundly—the bird's flight evidence of its sheer mastery and achievement!
All these different attributes meet together in this bird—beauty, honor, action, air and feathers all in one! But your fire, Christ, burns even more brightly, powerfully, and beautifully. Oh Christ, my knight in shining armor!
The bird was nothing special when you really think about it—even hard and boring work like plowing a field makes the upturned soil glitter and shine beautifully. And hot coals, fallen from a fire my lord, break open to reveal their beautiful red and golden colors.
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“The Windhover” Themes
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The Majesty of God and Nature
“The Windhover” is a celebration—even, perhaps, a kind of joyous prayer—that marvels at the wonders of the natural world and, in turn, at the majesty of God’s creation. The poem strives to show that these two aspects of the world—nature and God—are not really separate: the beauty of nature is both evidence of and a way of experiencing God’s sublime divinity.
The poem uses one small part of the nature—a falcon (specifically a kestrel)—to explore this relationship, with “the achieve of [and] the mastery” of the bird representing one small but undeniable proof of God’s power. The first chunk of the poem brings nature to life on the page, while the latter half then develops the way that natural beauty relates to God.
In the octet (the poem's first eight lines) the poem’s speaker is almost overcome by the beauty of the falcon. The poem’s language is fittingly full of its own dazzling beauty here (through poetic techniques like alliteration), as the speaker tries breathlessly to capture the experience of the falcon. Indeed, the emotional impact of this encounter is clear from the start: “I caught this morning morning’s minion,” the speaker says. If part of the speaker’s wonder at the falcon is its sheer and beautiful physical efficiency, the notion of “catching” it in flight shows that this is a rare—and profound—experience.
The speaker then marvels at different features of the falcon, each one of them majestic in its own way. The falcon’s “dapple[d]” feathers, its ability to smoothly hover in the strong air currents, the way it swiftly turns and dives (presumably to catch prey)—all of these affect the speaker profoundly. This emotional reaction comes about because the speaker sees in the falcon—in its incredible falcon-ness (that is, the way it perfectly inhabits being a falcon)—as proof of God’s existence, beauty, and power.
In other words, the falcon doesn’t just exist for the sake of it—it exists to express God’s will. The falcon’s incredible aerial ability and seemingly perfect (divine) design stands in for God’s masterful achievement in creating the world and all the beauty contained within it.
With the first part of the poem having proved the beauty of the falcon, the sestet (the final six lines of the sonnet) places the bird in a wider and arguably more mysterious context. The speaker admires the falcon’s “brute beauty and valour and act” (its fearlessness and physical abilities), but importantly sees these as proof of a type of metaphorical “fire” that also "breaks" from Christ, to whom the poem is dedicated. This fire is God’s creation. Think about it as a kind of molten lava flowing underneath the surface of all (seemingly individual) things—and making them part of one perfect whole. The fire, according to the speaker, is the source of all existence and is stunningly beautiful.
And it’s here the speaker makes the poem’s final but crucial point. This “fire” isn’t just perceptible in things that are obviously beautiful and impressive (like the bird, or, perhaps, a spectacular view); the fire of creation burns brightly within all things. Like embers fallen from a fire, even unremarkable surroundings can contain intense, “gold-vermillion” beauty. As an example, the speaker mentions the mundane and repetitive task of plowing the soil, which brings the reward of food and sustenance. A secondary, less literal meaning of this "sheer plod" could be the way that human beings serve God by staying true to their spiritual development. That is, even if the rewards of doing so don’t seem immediately obvious, or if the spiritual path seems fraught with difficulty, sheer effort forms an important part of the expression of God’s creation. Like the falcon’s full-hearted expression of falcon-ness, humans serve God through seeking him.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Windhover”
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Lines 1-2
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,The poem is dedicated "To Christ our Lord." The reader immediately knows, then, that the poem will explore some aspect of Christianity and the relationship between humanity and God. (The dedication also informs the target of the phrase "O my chevalier" in line 11, which could relate to the windhover, to Jesus/God, or, quite plausibly, to both.)
A windhover is a bird of prey more commonly known as a kestrel, a type of falcon. As the name "windhover" suggests, the kestrel is a skilled hunter able to ride air currents with ease and dexterity, waiting for the perfect moment to swoop down and catch its prey. Indeed, this is ability to seemingly pause mid-flight forms an important focus point for the speaker's sense of wonder (and, in turn, how this impressive bird speaks to God's presence in the world).
It's worth noting the precise choice of verb the speaker uses to describe the encounter with the kestrel. The speaker doesn't say I saw "this morning morning's minion" (by which the speaker means the kestrel itself). Instead, the speaker "caught" the kestrel—which, of course, isn't meant literally. The speaker catches the rare beauty of the bird in its element, a brief moment in time that offers the speaker a powerful reminder of God's majesty. The word "caught" also relates to the kestrel, which is hovering in the air looking to catch a meal. This subtly suggests a kind of interconnectedness between different parts of nature (in this case, the speaker and the kestrel) before the poem has even really gotten started.
The poem is typical of Hopkins's work of this period in its rich and vibrant use of devices like alliteration, consonance, and assonance—all of which appear in these first two lines. Hopkins deliberately delays specifying the subject of the poem (that is, the bird) until near the end of line 2, instead offering three distinct ways of describing the bird metaphorically—and each of these is thick with sound patterning.
The kestrel is "this morning morning's minion," the first "morning" relating to the timing of the speaker's experience, and "morning's minion" suggesting that the bird is the favorite and/or servant of the morning time more generally. Both definitions of "minion" are useful, but the idea of being a servant is especially appropriate in a poem that discusses the relationship between humanity, nature, and God. The alliteration, assonance, and consonance (highlighted above) in the phrase suggest perfection and a kind of precision—a quality that the speaker perceives in the aerial abilities of the bird.
After line 1's caesura (in the form of a comma before "king"), the bird is described as the prince ("dauphin"—not meaning dolphin!) of the "kingdom of daylight"—with both kingdom and light suggesting a kind of divinity (as in, the kingdom of heaven). The third description of the bird ends up being clearest:
[king]dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,
The sheer quantity of /d/ sounds here suggests an abundance of beauty, with the delay of "Falcon" (the family of birds to which the kestrel belongs) making the reader experience the poem's beautiful sounds in a kind of climactic build-up. The bird is "dapple[d]" because it has a spotty pattern on its feathers. (Hopkins explores the relationship between God's majesty and "dappled things" in a poem written around the same time, "Pied Beauty.")
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Lines 2-5
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! -
Lines 5-7
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. -
Lines 7-8
My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! -
Lines 9-10
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! -
Lines 10-11
AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! -
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.
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“The Windhover” Symbols
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The Windhover
The first nine lines of this poem focus intently on the windhover, a type of bird better known as a kestrel (a kind of falcon). The speaker is deeply moved by the sight of the bird as it hovers and then swoops down in a graceful arc towards the ground. But the speaker isn't merely a passionate birdwatcher! It's because of the symbolic qualities of the bird that the speaker's heart feels "stirred."
Like a virtuoso violinist, the windhover is a master of refinement, grace, and precision. These qualities don't come from the bird itself, but from its master, God—who, of course, is also the speaker's master. The skill and dexterity with which the bird rides the wind is a representation and expression of God's majesty, and God's skill and dexterity in creating the world. However, it's worth noting that the poem widens its perspective towards the end by arguing that this divine majesty is perceptible in all the world—even those parts of it (and life) that seem boring, difficult, and painful. In that sense, then, the kestrel doesn't just represent its own majesty—it is one small aspect of nature that symbolizes the entirety of God's creation.
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Soil
In line 12, the poem takes an interesting turn. Having spent most of its lines talking up the awe-inspiring sight of the bird, the speaker now states that really, after all, the bird isn't that remarkable. That's not because it isn't a majestic expression of God's will, but because it is no exception in being so: all the world expresses the same thing. Here, the speaker gives the example of how freshly upturned soil—referred to here as "sillion"—sparkles and glimmers in the sunshine. The soil, then, becomes symbolic of the idea that the fire of God's creation is present in everything, just below the surface.
The act of plowing a field is, of course, backbreaking hard work. This moment can also be interpreted as a symbolic affirmation of the importance of spiritual work, which can seem similarly laborious, repetitive, and unending. Hopkins's point seems to wish to remind the reader that all such work functions as a way of praising God and acknowledging the inherent wonder and beauty of the entirety of the world in all its forms.
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Fire
Fire in the poem essentially represents the glory and majesty of God. This is first clear in lines 10-11, which describes the "fire that breaks from thee"—Christ, to whom the poem is addressed—as far lovelier and more dangerous than even that of the magnificent windhover.
Fire reappears in the final two lines of the poem in the form of embers. Embers are pieces of wood or coal left after the main fire has burned out (though sometimes these pieces fall out of the fire while it is burning). They can be quite dangerous as it's not always immediately obvious that beneath their cool-looking surface they are still aglow with fierce heat and light. The poem uses embers as a second example of what has already been stated metaphorically by the previous section of line 12 and 13: that below the surface of appearances lies the intensely beautiful fire of God's creation. The earthly world is aglow with God's majesty, more obvious in some aspects of the world than others (to the speaker, the kestrel is perhaps a more obvious example). Finally, it's worth noting that the verb "gash" means to be cut open and is close in sound to "gush." This could be a gesture towards the crucifixion of Christ (to whom the poem is dedicated), whose own "gashes" (wounds) represent the salvation of humankind.
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“The Windhover” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
"The Windhover" is packed with alliteration. As with the poem's use of assonance and consonance, alliteration serves one main purpose overall: to make the poem sound beautiful. This beauty, in turn, is a way for the poem to do justice to both the magnificent sight of the windhover soaring through the sky and, even more importantly, to the majesty of God's creation. Furthermore, the vibrant and frequent use of alliteration relates to the way that speaker projects a state of "ecstasy" onto the kestrel. This ecstasy is a kind of religious fervor, felt and perceived by the speaker (rather than the bird). Alliteration thus heightens the sense that this poem is a kind of prayer directly praising God.
The alliteration that begins the poem is immediately arresting and comes in a group of three: "morning morning's minion," "daylight's dauphin," and "dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon." All three examples sound bright and clear, reflecting the clarity of the speaker's experience—that is, the awe felt by the speaker in observing the bird, and the instinctive connection made by the speaker between nature and God.
From "riding" in line 2 to "wimpling wing" at the end of line 4, the alliteration serves more to evoke the way that the kestrel alternately hovers and dives. As with the poem's meter and rhyme, alliteration comes and goes with a kind of rhythm that creates a sense of stasis and motion—exactly the rhythm that the bird observes in the air. In lines 5 to 6, the /s/ alliteration (sibilance) gives the poem a smooth, gliding quality that relates to the comparison of the bird's flight to the heel of an ice skater:
... then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smoothThe next main examples fall in 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!As with all the other instances in the poem, the alliteration here still works to maintain the presence of beauty and deliberate design. But here it's also used to evoke a sense of power through hard /b/ and /p/ sounds (highlighted above). These have a kind of toughness that matches with the description of the kestrel's beauty as "brute." This /b/ sound then links with the speaker's statement that Christ is even more "lovelier" and "dangerous" (meaning powerful)—a "billion times" more.
In line 12, "plod" chimes with "plough" to paint a picture of backbreaking farm labor, the closeness of the sounds suggesting repetitiveness. The three hard /g/ sounds in the final line return to the brightness of the opening, suggesting the intensity of the fire that burns inside all of God's creation ("gall," "gash," and "gold-vermilion"). Ending the poem with a color means that this bright sound also leaves the reader with a lasting impression of reddish-gold.
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Assonance
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Apostrophe
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Repetition
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Simile
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"The Windhover" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Minion
- Dauphin
- Dapple
- Riding
- Rung upon the rein
- Wimpling
- Ecstasy
- Hurl
- Rebuffed
- Valour
- Buckle
- Thee
- Chevalier
- Shéer Plód
- Plough
- Sillion
- Blue-black embers
- Gall themselves
- Gash
- Gold-vermilion
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This means servant or, in a less common usage, favorite.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Windhover”
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Form
"The Windhover" is a Petrarchan sonnet. Its 14 lines can thus be divided into two main sections: the octet (the first eight lines) and the sestet (the final six).
Hopkins also divides the sestet into two equal halves (three-line stanzas known as tercets). Though sonnets differ widely, the form can be thought of generally as a kind of question and answer—or a set-up followed by a commentary. Here, the octet is mainly concerned with capturing the beauty of the windhover in order to give the reader a sense of its aerial skill. At the same time, the octet develops the speaker's awe and wonder. This section ends by noting "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!"—which is the speaker's way of expressing admiration for the bird (and, by extension, God).
The sestet, starting at line 9, then marks an important shift in the poem because the speaker's focus becomes more abstract. The poem widens its scope to consider the way in which the bird's beauty and skill is an expression of the majesty of God—a majesty that, the poem argues, is present in all things. The tone in lines 9-11 remains ecstatic and joyous, as though the speaker is in a kind of rapture—and feels the overwhelming desire to sing a hymn of praise to God's creation. These lines are addressed to God/Christ.
The last three lines of the poem have a calmer tone, which makes sense in light of the progression of the sonnet's argument. The speaker says that it's "no wonder" that something as precise, graceful, and powerful as the windhover exists—because these qualities are present in all of God's work. Having soared to great rhetorical heights, the sonnet becomes literally more down to earth, making reference to soil and ashes, and expressing admiration for the way that the fire of God's creation burns within everything that's in the world.
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Meter
Hopkins's poetry is known for its emphasis on accentual meter and its high degree of flexibility when it comes to unstressed syllables. Hopkins called this sprung rhythm, which in essence means that the lines generally have a mostly regular amount of accents—or stressed syllables—but a varied number of unstressed syllables. So while Hopkins's contemporaries might stick to stricter meters, like iambic pentameter (five feet of unstressed-stressed syllables), Hopkins's poetry reads more freely. It is meant to feel like natural speech, to avoid the monotony of something like iambic pentameter while still retaining a sense of control.
The poetic feet of sprung rhythm usually begin with a stress, followed by another one to three unstressed beats. There is no need to get too caught up in the technical details however, and, indeed, Hopkins's only loosely defined the concept. The most important thing to focus on is where the stresses fall, and how the variation in foot length (how many syllables are in each poetic unit) contributes to the poem's overall tone.
The first line, for example, reads like pure iambic pentameter:
I caught | this morn- | ing morn- | ing's min- | ion, king-
The poem, then, starts with a steady rhythm that is fairly typical of sonnets at the time. But then look at how this regularity is turned on its head in the very next line:
dom of | daylight's | dauphin, | dapple- | dawn-drawn | Falcon, | in his | riding
This helps the language sound exciting and daring, evoking the speaker's ecstatic feelings towards the sight of the windhover. Other than the first line, no others in the poem strictly conform to iambic pentameter—which is part of what makes Hopkins's poetry so original (and perhaps contributes to the fact it wasn't until well after his death that people started to really engage with his work!).
Hopkins was certainly very attentive to the metrical effects of his poems, to the extent that he sometimes marked particular syllables to ensure that they were stressed by the reader. "Shéer plód" in line 12 is meant to be read as two stressed syllables, conjuring a sense of what's being described: the hard, back-breaking work of plowing soil.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Windhover" uses rhyme throughout. Unusually, the entire octet (the sonnet's first eight lines) shares the same rhyme sound—though with one important variation. All eight lines end in the /ing/ sound, but sometimes this is stressed and sometimes it is not; think "wing" vs. "riding." When the final /ing/ is not stressed, the prior syllable rhymes too; look at "riding" and "striding." The octet's scheme, then, might be thought of as:
AaaAAaaA
The capital letters mark stressed syllables and the lowercase unstressed. It could also be thought of as ABBAABBA; we like using lowercase and uppercase to illustrate the interesting relationship between these sounds. The most important thing to notice about the rhymes in the octet is the way that most of them refer to action and movement: "riding," "striding," "wing," "swing," and "gliding." This helps build the picture of the kestrel as a master of aerial skill, manipulating the wind to hover and dive at will.
The rhymes in the sestet follow a pattern of:
CDCDCD
The C rhymes—"here," "chevalier," and "dear"—all relate to the religious aspect of the poem, while the D rhymes suggest beauty and abundance: "billion," "sillion" (shiny soil), and "gold-vermilion."
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“The Windhover” Speaker
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The poem's opening dedication to Christ is important: it marks out the speaker as a Christian, and tells the reader that the sight of the windhover has religious significance. There is a sense of intimacy in the poem as well—in the speaker's rare encounter with the bird, and in the speaker's desire to directly address God about that experience. The poem thus becomes a kind of prayer, the speaker offering a song of praise to God's creation, and directly addressing Christ as "my chevalier" ("my knight").
The speaker of "The Windhover" is often interpreted as being Hopkins himself, though this isn't made explicit in the poem. What is clear is that the speaker is in awe of the windhover, and sees in the bird a kind of perfection that stands in for the craftsmanship of God in the creation of the world. The first eight lines (the poem's octet) capture that sense of wonder specific to the windhover, while the final six lines (the seset) allow the speaker to place this feeling in a wider religious context.
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“The Windhover” Setting
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The dedication at the start of "The Windhover"—"To Christ our Lord"—marks the poem out as a kind of prayer. This means that in one sense the setting of the poem is the speaker's mind, and the space between the speaker and God.
Looking at the poem on a more specific level, there's a clear distinction between the octet and sestet in terms of setting. The octet is almost exclusively concerned with the windhover itself, while the sestet widens out to place the speaker's experience in a wider religious context. The octet, then, is set high in the skies, full of movements and stops in a way that mimics the bird's ability to hover and swoop. The poem catches the speaker's breathless excitement in witnessing the windhover's incredible skill.
The second half of the poem is more abstract, comparing the "fire" within the kestrel to the fire of God (which runs through all creation—even, in the speaker's example, the soil). Here, the setting widens to discuss the entire world (through specific examples), with the reference to backbreaking farm work alluding to the difficult task of being a good Christian and spiritual servant of God. Both soil and ashes here stand in for the entirety of creation.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Windhover”
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Literary Context
"The Windhover" is one of Gerard Manley Hopkins's most celebrated poems. Though the poem was written in 1877, it was only published posthumously in 1918 in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, in fact burned his poems during his lifetime, feeling that they were against the principles of his Catholic religion; his friend and fellow poet Robert Bridges kept copies and ensured they were published after Hopkins's death.
Hopkins counts as a Victorian poet simply by virtue of writing during the Victorian era, but his work was unique for its time. Indeed, Hopkin's poetry wasn't entirely embraced at first, and looking at "The Windhover," it's perhaps easy to see why. His gymnastic use of grammar, decadent alliteration, and use of sprung rhythm were all strikingly original literary techniques. For Hopkins's part, he felt that "The Windhover" was the finest poem he ever wrote.
Hopkins loved language, and it's worth noting that in poems like "The Windhover" and "Pied Beauty," he was reaching for a language worthy of the beauty of God's creation, "the fire that breaks" from all things. His poetry shares themes with that of Christina Rossetti, who also frequently wrote devotional (religious) poetry and whose work Hopkins admired. An interesting poem of the era to contrast with Hopkins's is Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," which laments humankind's loss of faith in God—while Hopkins's poem seems to affirm this faith.
Hopkins was also deeply influenced by the poetry of John Keats, who wrote beautifully about nature in poems like "Ode to Autumn" and "Ode to a Nightingale." Finally, it's worth acknowledging that, though he was unknown during his own era, Hopkins's poetry became greatly influential during the 20th century, with poets like T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas all acknowledging Hopkins's effect on their work.
Historical Context
"The Windhover" is a religious poem, specifically offering praise to "Christ our Lord." Hopkins became a Roman Catholic while studying at Oxford University and, indeed, gave up poetry for a while, giving up "all beauty" until he felt he had God's approval.
Catholicism grew in popularity during the Victorian period (which refers to the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901), as did other denominations outside the Church of England. By the time Hopkins converted in 1866, Roman Catholics, though still a religious minority, had largely the same rights as other Christians. Nevertheless, the decision estranged Hopkins from family members—who were devout Anglicans, or members of the Church of England.
"The Windhover" intersects with an important question in religion: the extent to which God is present in the world and, in turn, knowable by man. This poem, as with Hopkins's others written during the same era, views the world as a manifestation of God—with the beauty of the world as an expression of God's own beauty, power, and craftsmanship.
Hopkins was also writing during the era of Romanticism, which saw an embrace of the natural world in response to the industrialization and urbanization of society. Such an appreciation for the beauty and wonder of nature is clearly present in this poem.
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More “The Windhover” Resources
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External Resources
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Hovering Kestrels — Learn more about kestrels and how, exactly, they hover in the wind.
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More Poems by Hopkins — A valuable resource from the Poetry Foundation.
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A Deep Dive Into Sprung Rhythm — An in-depth look at Hopkins's metrical innovations.
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The Poem in Song — "The Windhover" set to music (alongside other bird poems).
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Hopkins's Life and Work — An informative BBC Radio documentary discussion about the poet.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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