Having started off on Hopkins I can’t seem to stop. Here’s another beauty – a poem that does justice to its subject by being every bit as glorious as what it seeks to describe. It is a poem with warm breast and bright wings, an immense and singing poems that thrills the ear as few other poems do.
In his introduction to the poem, Kunitz speaks of the wonder of discovering Hopkins for the first time – it’s an amazement we’ve all shared at one point or the other, but more importantly it’s a sense of awe I come back to every time I re-read Hopkins and am reminded again of just how miraculous a poet he is. Just that single line – “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil” is enough to make me shut my eyes and savour the exquisiteness.
 Video Courtesy the Favorite Poem Project. Warning: Realplayer Required.
It’s the beginning of Spring Break, and the weather in Philadelphia has turned warm right on cue. What better way to celebrate the coming season with this ecstatically beautiful Hopkins poem? A poem of lines “long and lovely and lush”, a poem that “does so rinse and wring/ the ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing”.
“The achieve of, the mastery of the thing”. If there was ever a poet meant to be read aloud, it is Hopkins. The sheer intricacy of the rhyme in Hopkins is breathtaking, the density of assonance that makes his work a thing to be savoured mouthful by slow mouthful.
What’s incredible about The Windhover is the way the verse itself conveys the sense of something circling, shifting restlessly, something exquisitely balanced yet tremendously soaring. You can feel the tension here, can sense the muscles straining to align themselves perfectly to the wind, the poem itself shifting smoothly from current to curent, line to line, a flight carefully constructed, yet achieved, unmatched in its grace and power. There is nothing easy about this, every word and every phrase in this poem has been carefully selected, weighed and hand-carved with the skill of a true master. But in the end all that sheer plod makes the sillion shine, and the sound of words falling through the air gash the heart of the amazed listener gold-vermilion.
P.S. I’ve been meaning to run Hopkins for a while now, but a poem like the Windhover is one I wouldn’t dare even attempt reading aloud. So I was delighted to find this Richard Austin reading on the Net (courtesy of the Victorian Web).