of his imagination?
“I caught this morning.” Or may not the bird have been one of the stuffed birds in the glass cases of the Waterton Collection which were then housed at St. Beuno’s? May not the poet have been gazing on one of these cases, the one labeled “Windhover”? And then may not his imagination have caught fire, taken over and shown him this bird no longer in a glass case, like “the caged skylark”, but rejoicing in the liberty of “his free fells”? In other words, may not the windhover of this famous poem be nothing but a stuffed bird?
“I caught this morning.” In conclusion, I ask, “May not the “I” of the poem be indeed the poet himself? And then may not the “Thou” he is addressing be the stuffed bird imagined in flight? Then it isn’t so much the bird who is flying as the poet who is flying on the wings of his poetic imagination. And then it isn’t the inanimate bird who is being addressed but the poet who is speaking to himself under the image of this imaginary bird.”
“I caught this morning.” So when the poet says, “I caught this morning morning’s minion,” he means not just that he caught sight of the bird. He means that he caught something of himself in the bird. Or he caught sight of something in the bird that he would like to be, in what he sees as “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing”. In the same way, Lear says to Cordelia, as they are being taken off to prison, “Have I caught thee?” Then what Lear means is that in her he has caught his better self, or his very heart – Coeur de Lear.
“I caught this morning.” Needless to say, in the first part of his poem, or what is called the octet, the poet is speaking not to but about the bird. He is describing what he sees in the flight of the falcon. And he brings his description to a conclusion with the words, “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!” (Note the pronounced stress on “thing!”) In this part there is no dialogue, and no monologue either. It is all objective, if imaginative, description.
“O my chevalier!” But in the second part of the poem, or what is called the sestet, there is a dialogue, in which someone is speaking to someone else as “thee” and “O my chevalier!” and “ah my dear”. Now it is that we are obliged to ask, “Who is speaking to whom?”
“O my chevalier!” Is it the poet who is speaking no longer about the bird, as in the octet, but to the bird? After having called the bird “kingdom of daylight’s dauphin”, with the imagery of riding a horse, is he now calling him “my chevalier”, and even “my dear”? Or is it the poet speaking to someone else, after having turned away from “Brute beauty and valor and act”? Those words imply giving himself airs, taking pride in himself, and pluming himself, in a manner contrary to the standard of Christ our Lord, to whom the poet has dedicated his poem.
“O my chevalier!” Then, I further ask, “Is that other person Christ himself?” Is the poet telling Christ to “buckle” down, with the assurance that by doing so he will be “a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous”? Is he calling Christ “my chevalier”? Is he reminding Christ that “sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine”, and that “blue-bleak embers Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion”? That is not to be thought!
“O my chevalier!” So I continue asking, “Isn’t it rather Christ who is telling these things to the poet?” Then, if the poet has described the bird in flight, if only in his poetic imagination, in the eight lines of the octet, may we not say it is someone else, no less a person than “Christ our Lord”, to whom he subsequently dedicates his poem, who is speaking to his heart during the remaining six lines of the sestet?
“O my chevalier!” Given this latter hypothesis, that it is Christ our Lord, as the better self of the poet, who is speaking to him, to his “heart in hiding”, then everything in this puzzling poem falls into place. In the light of the two Ignatian meditations on “The Kingdom of Christ” and “The Two Standards”, mayn’t we say that the composition of place which occupies the octet is immediately followed by a colloquy? And in that colloquy isn’t it rather Christ speaking to the heart of the poet than the poet speaking to Christ?
“O my chevalier!” After all, it isn’t Christ who needs any such reassurances as that “the fire that breaks from thee then (is) a billion times told lovelier”, or that “sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine”, or that “blue-bleak embers” on falling “gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion”. It is rather the poet who needs such reassurances. It is the poet who is authoritatively told not to pay attention to the “Brute beauty and valor and act” of the bird. Those qualities are rather a temptation to pride, which is distinctive of the standard of Satan, whereas it is to “buckle” down in humble obedience to his superiors, that characterizes the other standard of Christ.
“O my chevalier!” Thus it is the poet who is addressed as “my chevalier”, even as Christ speaks to his followers as “knights” in the meditation of “The Kingdom”. He even lovingly caresses the poet as “my dear”. It is the poet who has to endure the “sheer plod” of his theological studies from day to day, according to Ignatius’ exhortation in his Rules for Scholastics. It is the poet who sees his religious motivation reduced from the blazing fire of his noviceship days to merely “blue-bleak embers”. It is the poet who needs the reassurance that even in these embers – as Wordsworth comforts himself in his “Immortality Ode” – there lives a hidden fire, so that when they fall through the grate they “gall themselves and gash gold-vermilion”.
“O my chevalier!” All this is what Christ, as the better self of the poet, the heart of Hopkins, has to tell him on the occasion of his vision of the wind-hover, whether imprisoned in the glass case or flying over his free fells. Whether the bird is free or in prison, the object of vision or imagination, doesn’t matter so much. What matters is the description of the bird in flight as preparation for what follows in the heart of the poet. In either case, the poet is passive. With his eyes, whether real or imaginary, he sees the bird and admires the achievement and mastery of the bird from his “heart in hiding”.
“O my chevalier!” Then within his heart he hears the voice of one speaking to him as it were in the depths of his conscience, whether the voice of God or, more precisely, the voice of Christ our Lord. He hears one addressing him as “my chevalier”, or knight, even as “my dear”, the beloved disciple. He hears one reassuring him that it isn’t the doing deeds of knightly prowess, such as “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing” shown by the bird. It is rather buckling down in humility and obedience, plodding through the heavy earth of his studies, allowing his seeming “blue-bleak embers” to fall and gall themselves. It is then that the outcome will be “a billion times told lovelier” in the symbolic form of “gold-vermilion”.
Thus it isn’t so much the poet who has caught sight of the bird from the beginning of his poem. It is Christ who has caught the poet in his “toils of grace”, just as a fisherman catches a haul of fishes in the Sea of Galilee. It is also, I may add, just as Cordelia catches her dear father Lear, even when he thinks he has caught her. “I caught this morning.”
“Glory be to God for dappled things!”
“Glory be to God.” AMDG – literally, “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam”, that is, “To the Greater Glory of God”. That is the motto of Ignatius and the Society of Jesus which he founded in 1540. It is a motto to which we have long been accustomed, at least within the Catholic Church, and especially within the Society of Jesus. But it may be likened to the proverbial water flowing off a duck’s back. It is so familiar, it is all but meaningless.
“Glory be.” One even wonders why a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins could have admitted such a banality in the opening line of one of his poems. Only he is always
