The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
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
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.

.

I suppose it’s the teeming abundance of images, ideas and suggestions it contains that makes ‘The Windhover’ such a remarkable poem but it was the sheer energy of its utterance that made me fall in love with it at school. At that point I had only the faintest, most general idea of what it meant beyond expressing the poet’s joy at the sight of a bird and moving from that into thoughts about Christ’s self-sacrifice. This ‘energy of utterance’ still seems to me the most solid, immediate and irresistible element of the delight it gives. By ‘utterance’, of course, I don’t just mean the sounds you hear in the poem, I mean the physical energy demanded of you and released in you as you say the words, even if you articulate them in the silence of your own mind.

There are several paradoxes to the way this poem moves. For one thing, it seems to sweep extraordinarily fast through and between lines, even though there are so many stressed syllables – something that would usually have the effect of slowing the movement down. No doubt this is partly because the rhythm of word and phrase is so often trochaic, ie going from a stressed syllable to an unstressed one, and that generally seems to speed things up in comparison with a movement in the other direction, from unstressed to stressed. To my ear at least the fast pace really starts with ‘king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin’, an uninterrupted sweep that simply disregards the line ending. I’m normally rather irritated by the splitting of words at the end of lines, but here it’s as if the split simply doesn’t happen on the all-important rhythmic and phonetic level. Again, disyllabic feminine rhymes such as we find with ‘riding’, ‘striding’, ‘gliding’ and ‘hiding’ usually seem comically overdone in English verse, but here the sheer energy and intensity of the writing overwhelm any such effect. Technically, I suppose, two specific features are important because of the way they create a medium within which these very strong rhymes seem natural. One is that the density of phonetic patterning throughout the octave creates a medium within which these very strong rhymes seem natural parts of the living body of the poem rather than standing out in an obtrusive and self-conscious way. The other is that they seem to lean so strongly forward into the next line that we don’t pause over them. Again, going back to my starting point, it’s a matter of the energy of movement that they both ride on and reinforce.

Staying with the opposition of sound and meaning, I’m quite certain that in those days I only had the vaguest idea that vermilion was a kind of red so any visual image I formed around ‘gash gold-vermilion’ was formed as it were in reverse – I assumed ‘gold-vermilion’ referred to the colour I’d already seen in broken embers rather than deriving my idea of the embers from the description. However, the sheer sound and strangeness of ‘gold-vermilion’ gave a leap of joy coming at the climax of the poem. The intensity of the stress on the ‘mil’ syllable is certainly part of this effect. So is the sheer auditory opulence of the disyllabic rhyme, naturalized in the poem in the way I described earlier with reference to the riding / striding / gliding / hiding chain of rhyme words. I think it’s also to do with a magical sense of arrival or return achieved by mainly phonetic means. ‘Sillion’ – at least as I read the poem – sounds out in a rather muted way. The poet is moving tentatively towards his conclusion. The final rhyme on ‘vermilion’ closes the poem on a note of ecstatic, ringing conviction. As it does so it gathers earlier sounds and ideas into itself – the rhyme with ‘billion’ and that wonderful word ‘minion’ from the first line.