Gerard Manley Hopkins Writes The Windhover
Poets involved
What happened
In May 1877, while studying for the priesthood at St Beuno's College in North Wales, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins composed The Windhover, a sonnet dedicated to Christ and inspired by his observation of a kestrel — a falcon colloquially known as a windhover — riding and mastering the wind over the Welsh hills. The poem, written in Hopkins's invented sprung rhythm, celebrates the kestrel's wind-riding mastery as a natural manifestation of divine beauty and power. Though not published until Robert Bridges included it in Hopkins's Collected Poems in 1918, it is now consistently ranked among the greatest sonnets in the English language.
Literary impact
The Windhover is the supreme literary celebration of a bird using wind, and its daring formal innovations — sprung rhythm, compound adjectives, alliterative density — made it one of the most influential poems on twentieth-century British and American verse. W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Ted Hughes all acknowledged Hopkins's wind poetry as foundational to their own approaches to sound and natural description. The poem's theological framing of wind-mastery as spiritual beauty connected Hopkins's work to a long tradition of wind-as-divine-breath in Christian poetry from Pentecost onwards.
Source: Wikipedia
