Wednesday, March 11, 2015
The Sounds of Windover
The thing that caught me the most with the poem was the expert control of sound. The poem uses alliteration such as "King / dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn" to speed up the poem and tie it to the sensation of flight. The poem moves so fast at times it is easy to get tripped up and this reflects the falcons fierceness. The second two stanza also make a great use of sound, but instead by interjecting excited exclamations. For example "buckle AND the fire breaks" explodes off the page and even when reading silently you can feel that same intensity of reading it aloud. Ultimately I couldn't glean much subtext out of the poem other than a celebration of life mediated the experience of a bird, but it didn't seem necessary with this poem. While my reading remained largely surface, the intensity with which this celebration is presented makes up for the lack of layered ideas. This poem seemed to focus on making the message so beautifully constructed that there isn't the need for any "deeper" thoughts.
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we might dig deeper: the description of the bird is clearly a set up for expressing Hopkins' view of Christ, specifically that the fire that "breaks" from Christ is "a billion times / Told lovlier" than that of the windhover. The poem's take away from this comparison is lodged in the rather obscure third stanza, which is a confirmation of Hopkins' assertion that we can understand Christ if we multiply his reaction to the bird by a billion. So, why is there "no wonder in it"? In the third stanza, Hopekins implies that we don't really need to look at something so magnificent as the bird to see the incredible beauty of the world--we can see in in the shining of the earth that has been turned over by a plough (the "sheer plod" being the man walking behind the horse drawn plough), or in the blue embers of a fire that fall and give off red and yellow sparks. These tiny gleamings of the mudane, everyday life themselves tell of Christ's magnificence.
ReplyDeleteAlso, see my comment on David's post above for a reading of the final lines as a commentary on Christ's crucifixion--
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