Sequences of Phrase and Feeling in “The Windhover”

Abstract

Gerard Manley Hopkins distinguished and approved “sequences of feeling and phrase” in his friend Robert Bridges’s sonnets. A close reading of “The Windhover” reveals Hopkins’s own use of these sequences with a remarkable shift between the octave, developed by a series of adverbial and adjectival participial and prepositional phrases, and the sestet which proceeds as a series of declarative-exclamatory statements. The first half of the sonnet follows the kestrel’s flight as it “hovers” (hence its name) into a fixed position either by beating its wings (“hurl”) or by sitting still (“gliding”). This act of hovering is then transferred from the bird “there” to the poet’s own heart “here” by the verb “Buckle,” with its meaning of joining, bending, putting on, and holding back. This shift in action occurs also in place and time, from past to present, outdoors to an indoor chapel where the poet attended Mass each May morning. The action itself incorporates inscape as catching sight of the pattern of the kestrel’s flight in the morning of Christ’s created light and instress as the heart’s response in thought and being to Christ’s uplifting grace in the fire of redemption. “As kingfishers catch fire” reverses the sequences of feeling and phrase in “The Windhover” as it too moves from the physical (“each mortal thing”) to the supernatural as the “just man” becomes an after-Christ.