What is Windhover according to Hopkins?
“The Windhover” is a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). “Windhover” is another name for the common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus). The name refers to the bird’s ability to hover in midair while hunting prey.
What does The Windhover bird represent?
Answer: The windhover might represent to the poet the beauty of God’s creation. The bird is just an ordinary creature but the poet finds the majesty of God’s hand in it as it who was in the sky and performs brilliant skills.
How has Hopkins summed up the qualities of the Falcon?
The poet, through the above lines, sums up the qualities of the falcon-brute, beauty, valour, “act”, pride, plume. All these qualities combine together in the falcon. The poet tells his heart to surrender itself completely to Christ. The poet’s soul, too, is “blue-bleak” or seemingly lifeless.
What is the religious significance of the poem The Windhover?
“The Windhover” by Gerard Hopkins is a religious poem. The bird depicted in the poem can be interpreted as a metaphor for Christ. For example, the narrator in the poem depicts the bird as being in control of the wind, thus resembling Christ’s function of being in control as well.
How does Hopkins refer to the pulsating manifestation of the divine in his poems?
‘Instress’, according to Hopkins, is the energy of God pulsating through all created things (‘The world is charged with the Grandeur of God’). It is a coherent force, coherent because it comes from a single source. He sees the inscape and feels the instress.
What is the summary of the poem Windhover?
The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of prey. The poet describes how he saw (or “caught”) one of these birds in the midst of its hovering.
How is the falcon depicted in the poem The Windhover?
A windhover is a name for a kestrel, which is a small, common falcon. It is known for hovering in the air (wind hover) while facing the wind. This suggests the falcon is vulnerable, about to be broken or pushed away by the wind, but also that the falcon is steadfast, buckled to his place in the sky.
What are Hopkins view about the presence of God in the natural world?
While Hopkins never doubted the presence of God in nature, he became increasingly depressed by late nineteenth-century life and began to doubt nature’s ability to withstand human destruction. His later poems, the so-called terrible sonnets, focus on images of death, including the harvest and vultures picking at prey.
What special poetic language is used in Hopkins poem The Windhover?
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.
How does Hopkins portray the beauty of nature with divinity?
Throughout the poem Hopkins is praising God’s creation in nature and how he was able to create a multitude of colors throughout nature and the divine beauty of it. In all of his poetry, Hopkins mainly concentrates on nature and the beauty of it that God has blessed society with.
Is the Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins a sonnet?
The poem, The Windhover, by Gerard Manley Hopkins is a sonnet in sprung rhythm. It was Hopkins’s favourite poem and he called it “the best thing I ever wrote”. The sub-title of the poem, “To Christ Our Lord” is significant, because it provides a clue to the phrase “my chevalier” which applies as much to Christ as to the windhover.
What happens at the end of the Windhover by John Hopkins?
The poem slows abruptly at the end, pausing in awe to reflect on Christ. This poem follows the pattern of so many of Hopkins’s sonnets, in that a sensuous experience or description leads to a set of moral reflections.
Who is the author of the Windhover poem?
His poems are published online and in print. The Windhover is one of the best known sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins and was inspired by the sight of a small falcon, a kestrel, which often faces against the wind to hover above its prey. Hence the alternative name of windhover.
How is the bird described in the Windhover?
The bird pivots round on the tip of his extended wing, which is described as “wimpling”, that is, rippling like a nun’s wimple in movement. At this moment of conflict with the pressure of the wind, the bird feels ecstasy and sweeps off in the direction of the wind as though on a swing.