84 chapter 3
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.If we read Hopkins’s poems right, we will experience the “beauty and valour
and act” that he witnessed, and the flash of beauty, the inscape of the poem,
will be visible to us. Despite Hopkins’s equivocation about his poetic vocation
(whether he should be able to master the writing of poetry or whether that
distracted him from his Jesuit calling, as well as how to reconcile those two
important impulses), “The Windhover” is an ars poetica of how we might
catch the beauty of Christ, ourselves, if we too are able to “master” the meter
of this particular sonnet.
Hopkins revised “The Windhover” meter many times; as the manuscripts
show, he crossed out “sprung” rhythm to write “falling / riding paeonic
rhythm”; he changed the great colon between “big : wind” to two diacritical
marks in line 7, and he added “the achieve of ” in place of a dash: “stirred for a
bird—for the mastery of the thing.” Like “Buckle” and “chevalier,” the “thing”
has an exclamation point in all of the drafts. The chevalier is commonly read as
Christ, and “Buckle” (the subject of many an exegesis) is the central crux of the
poem, commonly read as the bird’s dive downward after its suspension in air.
But the “thing,” I want to suggest, is not only the mastery, the achievement of
Christ, of the bird, but also, as we witness the poet wrestling with the instabil-
ity of his system (perhaps sprung, perhaps, significantly, falling, bird-like, de-
spite a rhythm that seems to rise), he celebrates his own achievement, his own
possible mastery. After all, he wrote to Bridges in 1879, “I shall shortly send
you an amended copy of ‘The Windhover:’ the amendment only touches a
single line, I think, but as that is the best thing I ever wrote I shd. like you to
have it in its best form.”^18 Hopkins wants admiration for his mastery in the
poem as he admired Christ’s mastery through the image of the bird; could a
new rhythm stir a reader’s heart “in hiding” toward seeing something beyond
what is described in the poem?
In Bridges’s “Sonnet—I Would Be a Bird,” written concurrently with Hop-
kins’s “The Windhover,” Bridges turns the bird trope on its head, as if to signal
the particular kind of formal awareness that both he and Hopkins bring to
their poems.^19 Rather than the location of conventional song, the birds in “The
Windhover” and Bridges’s “Sonnet—I Would Be a Bird” are both symbols