The Work
'The Windhover' is a Petrarchan sonnet written by Hopkins on May 30, 1877, at St. Beuno's College in North Wales. It bears the dedication 'To Christ our Lord' - the only poem in Hopkins's mature body of work to carry such a dedication, which marks it as his most direct act of poetic prayer addressed to Christ. Hopkins told Robert Bridges that 'The Windhover' was 'the best thing I ever wrote,' and many readers - including W.H. Gardner, F.R. Leavis, and the Oxford literary tradition - have agreed, calling it one of the finest sonnets in the English language.
Like all Hopkins's mature work, it was unknown during his lifetime. Published in 1918, it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of compressed religious art. The poem describes the sight of a kestrel (the windhover, or hover-kestrel) in flight, using the bird's mastery of wind currents as the occasion for an ecstatic meditation on beauty, Christ, and the paradox of the Incarnation. Its linguistic density - every word simultaneously carries physical description, emotional response, and theological argument - makes it both immediately accessible as a nature lyric and inexhaustibly complex as a theological poem.
Biblical Engagement
John 1:14 - 'And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth' - is the foundational Incarnation text underlying the poem's central move. The beauty of the kestrel in flight is not merely physical beauty but an instance of the beauty of the Logos made visible in the created world. For Hopkins, following Scotist Christology, all created beauty is ultimately Christological: it is the self-expression of the divine Beauty in matter.
Philippians 2:6-8 - 'Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross' - provides the kenosis theology that underlies the sestet's central image of 'buckle.' Christ's glory is not diminished by the Incarnation and Passion but intensified: the 'brute beauty' of the kestrel in its element is a figure of the pre-incarnate Logos; the 'buckle' of the Incarnation - the descent into flesh and death - is the moment when the beauty 'falls' from its element into something more wonderful still.
Hebrews 1:3 - '[Jesus], who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person' - provides the Christology of divine image that Hopkins's poem enacts. The kestrel is an 'express image' of divine majesty in the way all creation is: it is a visible expression of an invisible glory. Christ is the 'express image' of God in a more fundamental sense: he is the one in whom all the beauty scattered across creation is gathered into a single personal presence.
Romans 8:19-22 - 'For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God... the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now' - provides the cosmic context for the poem's redemptive reading of natural beauty. The kestrel's mastery of the air is a figure of the perfection for which all creation yearns; the moment of 'buckle' - when the beauty of flight condenses into the beauty of sacrifice - enacts in miniature the cosmic movement from creation's longing to redemption's fulfillment.
Author and Context
Hopkins wrote 'The Windhover' in May 1877, fifteen months before his ordination as a Jesuit priest. It was a period of intense spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic development. His reading of Duns Scotus the previous year had given him philosophical language for what he had always intuited: that the particularity of created things - their haecceitas, their 'thisness' - was not an obstacle to the knowledge of God but its richest medium. The kestrel is not a symbol of Christ (as in allegorical poetry) but an instance of Christ's beauty: the same Logos who is the source of all created beauty manifests himself with special intensity in those creatures that achieve their proper perfection with particular completeness.
The Jesuit tradition of Finding God in All Things - the core Ignatian spiritual principle - authorized this approach. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises trained Jesuits to find divine love in the details of the natural world and to make those details occasions of prayer. Hopkins's great nature sonnets are the poetic expression of this spiritual practice: attentive observation of creation, leading to contemplation of the Creator, leading to doxology.
The Poem
The octave describes the kestrel's flight in a sustained, breathless sentence: 'I caught this morning morning's minion, king- / dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon.' The accumulated epithets - 'minion' (beloved one), 'dauphin' (crown prince of daylight), 'dapple-dawn-drawn' (drawn out by the dappled dawn) - build an image of aristocratic natural perfection. The kestrel rides the wind with perfect ease: '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!' The ecstasy is both physical (the perfection of the bird's flight) and the poet-observer's response to it.
The sestet turns on the word 'Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!' The word 'buckle' is the poem's crux: it means simultaneously (1) to clasp or join together (the various excellences of the bird gather into a single moment of concentrated beauty); (2) to collapse or give way (as a buckled wheel collapses); and (3) to apply oneself with concentrated force (to buckle down). All three meanings operate: the beauties of nature buckle - gather, collapse into, and intensify - in the Incarnation.
'AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!' This is the poem's climax: the beauty that 'breaks from' Christ - the beauty of the Incarnation, of the Passion, of the sacrificial love that gives itself completely - is a 'billion / Times told lovelier' than even the kestrel's mastery. The comparison is not diminishment of the kestrel but intensification: natural beauty is real, wonderful, and a genuine manifestation of God; but the beauty of Christ crucified surpasses it as utterly as the noon sun surpasses a candle.
The final tercet offers two humble similes for this principle: the plough that shines when it cuts the earth (only when it is being used and 'injured' by friction does it gleam); the ember that reveals its 'blue-bleak' fire only when it falls from the grate and 'gashes gold-vermilion.' The Passion is both images simultaneously: Christ's glory was fully revealed in what appeared to be his defeat.
Critical Reception
The poem attracted divergent responses from the moment of publication. I.A. Richards, the Cambridge critic who introduced practical criticism, used it as a test case for close reading. Yvor Winters criticized it as obscurantist. F.R. Leavis defended it as the finest example of the English language's capacity for compressed beauty. The debate about the meaning of 'buckle' alone has generated dozens of scholarly articles.
Theological Significance
'The Windhover' is the most concentrated poetic expression of what Hans Urs von Balthasar would later call 'theo-aesthetics' - the theology of divine beauty. It argues that natural beauty is not a distraction from God but a revelation of God, and that the supreme manifestation of divine beauty is not natural splendor but the kenotic love of the Incarnation and Passion. The 'brute beauty' of nature is real; the beauty of Christ crucified is 'a billion times told lovelier.' This hierarchy of beauty - natural beauty pointing toward and surpassed by sacrificial beauty - is one of the most theologically sophisticated insights in English poetry.
Legacy
Hopkins's influence on twentieth-century religious poetry is comprehensive. W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill all acknowledge debts. Theologians of beauty - particularly von Balthasar, whose seven-volume The Glory of the Lord is the definitive twentieth-century development of the tradition Hopkins represents - have cited Hopkins as the supreme poet of theological aesthetics.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Philippians 2:5-11 (the kenotic Incarnation), John 1:1-18 (the Logos and its glory), Hebrews 1:1-4 (the Son as the brightness of God's glory), Isaiah 53:2-5 (beauty in the Suffering Servant), and Colossians 1:15-20 (Christ as the image of the invisible God).
Further Reading
- W.H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition (2 vols., 1944-1949) - the standard scholarly account. - Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 3 (1986) - includes a sustained engagement with Hopkins as the supreme modern poet of theological aesthetics. - Norman White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography (1992) - the definitive biography, essential for understanding the poem's composition context.