Gerard Manley Hopkins has been hailed as a prolific and challenging poet. His style was so different from his contemporaries. It is difficult to enjoy Hopkins’ poem without having an intimate knowledge of his beliefs, life and background. Hopkins is a more fulfilling artist because of his love for nature and his scientific innovations. He observed and recorded nature in prose and poetry. This helped him to develop a language for describing what he saw, terms like ‘inscape’ or ‘instress’.
Hopkins’ poems all have the intention of displaying the particularity and timelessness of an object. He coined the term ‘inscape’ in order to express this idea. He devised a poetic language with a new rhythm that he named ‘Sprung Rhythm. It’s a meter that allows the poet to adjust the speed of lines to capture the poetry’s life. Hopkins was keen to find ways to rejuvenate poetic language, and also developed rhythmic effects. Hopkins was a prolific poet who used familiar words in new contexts. He also became interested in ways to revive poetic language after converting to Roman Catholicism. It allows Hopkins a closer connection to natural speech rhythms. F R Leavis who was Hopkins’ first champion, said Hopkins was the only English poet that could match Shakespeare’s poetic imitation of natural spoken speech. He also had a profound influence on his poetic inventions due to his doctrinal convictions. He was not only a Jesuit, Catholic and priest. He was also deeply committed to Mary as God’s mother and the doctrines about the Immaculate Conception.
He was deeply moved to learn that Christ was born as a man to bear human suffering and share in humanity. His poetic innovations were greatly influenced by Christian beliefs. Victorians found the concept of self-care and nature very important.
Hopkins was also puzzled by the Victorian search to understand self and nature. Hopkins’ Christian faith was a strength in his artistic pursuit. This is unlike his contemporaries. Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson are among the Catholic contemporaries to Hopkins. There is a metaphysical revival. These poets did not have the ability to influence poetry or make an impact in society. Hopkins is the only one to succeed in his efforts after the 17th-century to create a new era for Religious poetry.
Hopkins’ poetry became praise, worship and an extension to his spiritual search. His short life gave rise to religious poems. His poems emphasize the idea that nature can meditate between God and self. He sees a flow between nature and God. Nature stands between God’s self and God’s. Hopkins’ whole poem is composed of a triangular relationship system. Hopkins reacts to the subject, which leads to god. Hopkins used ‘The Windhover” in 1887 to illustrate this relationship. Hopkins included the ‘hidden’ element of his dedication, titled ‘To Christ Our Lord’.
The poem is a beautiful example of Hopkins’ marriage of romantic sensibilities and religious fervor. This poem is a sonnet in the same vein as many Hopkins’ sonnets. A sensuous experience description leads directly to a series of moral reflections. Hopkins’s scholars have paid the greatest attention to this particular poem, which is a central poem. Some call it a sensual piece, others call it a confession of regret that he left the world to become priest and religious.
The poem’s original meaning was not affected by the dedication to God. Hopkins, a Christian poet who is most Christ-possessed, is mentioned only once in the poem. Hopkins shows a photo of a hovering windhover in the octave. Hopkins, the artist, sees the beauty and grace of the bird as it rises. Its beauty and striking characteristics are described by Hopkins. It was described as the darling and prince of the dawn, which he referred to as “the darling of the morning”, a symbol of beauty and striking qualities.
Its flight is likened to a steady and expert horse rider, according to the poet. The poet imagines a windhover sitting proudly high. The wings control allows the bird’s flight to spiral. The graceful movement of the kestrel can be compared to an ice skater who glides in a straight line with grace and ease.
The poet observes the bird secretly and marvels at its beauty while it is flying. The poet can use the opening of his sestet as a reminder to himself and to further explain the bird’s movement. Hopkins refers to it as ‘Brute beauty’. This is, Hopkins says, a fundamental primal beauty. All of nature’s good attributes, such brute beauty (air, valor), pride, act, plume and pride), are found in this bird. Hopkins finds joy in nature and is drawn to worship God. The term ‘Buckle’ can be used to refer to being tightly fastened, such as with a belt.
Except for the rhythm, there is no significance to the capitalization “AND”. The poet refers to Christ in line 11. The beauty that Christ reveals is one billion times more beautiful than that of the bird. This isn’t surprising. Simple plodding produces the beauty that the plow shines along a newly turned furrow. So ordinary, even if dead, can leave behind a trail gold vermilion fires. The core of the poem is Christ’spassion, which is the source from which all other spirals and which returns everything.
The bird’s landing on its pray is not a sign of fall of nature and man, but of the descent into hell of human misery. The poet describes several tricks that the bird uses to fly and the beauty it produces. The second stanza is dedicated to Christ and his beauty.
Thus, he claims that nature’s beauty does not surprise him and concludes that every thing he sees reminds his of Christ’s pain and sufferings that have made human existence so beautiful and afforded us the chance to enjoy it. Everything is a reminder of Christ’s wounds, pain, and sacrifice to this Christ-follower. This indicates that he is always grateful to Christ. The poem’s subtitle says it all: a thanksgiving for Christ.
The poem is based on his traditional “sprung rhythm”, Anglo-Saxon grammar, alliteration. While the sonnet’s difficulty is due to its confusing sentence order and grammatical structure, they also demonstrate the mastery of language. Many readers have been puzzled by the sestet’s apparent deviation from the metrical introduce in each octave.
