The Windhover Essay Questions

Using examples from the text, describe how Hopkins' use of poetic devices such as alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and meter shapes the reader's experience and understanding of the themes of "The Windhover."

Hopkins' talent for the use of sound and rhythm for poetic effect is one of the most dazzling in English language poetry, and the path to understanding the significance of his art runs through a close, attentive exploration of the rich, almost overwhelming soundscapes characteristic of most of his best poems. Excessive alliteration has often, historically, been frowned upon in critical assessments of poetry, and in the opening lines of "The Windhover," as powerful as they are, one can see why: it's an extremely "loud" poetic instrument, constantly drawing attention to itself. It slows our reading down, and the reader feels almost like they're trying to maneuver their way through a tongue-twister. Far from distracting from the "meaning" of the poem, however, the resistance this density of sound presents to any attempt to skim over it—bogging us down in a thicket of sound—is what makes "The Windhover" great.

To give one key example: the first few lines' movements in sound and rhythm confuse and therefore demand the full attention of the ear. Look at the loping "morning morning's minion": all three words share not just a first letter, but virtually every letter and sound. Even in the case of the 'g' lacking in 'minion', we seem to hear its echo in the nasally "n." The reader might even find that this effect occurs visually as well, as a brief moment in which one catches oneself looking for the "missing" "g" at the end of "minion." The great difference in meaning produced by the simple "'s", made to seem even smaller by its lack of resonance with any other sounds in the line, is another goad to close attention, a thought quickly taken up by the cheeky enjambment of "king- / dom." Like the hawk keenly searching for its prey, the poem forces us to look, and listen, with our whole being—as though catching the meaning were, like catching our next meal, a matter of life and death.

Traditional sonnets make use of a technique called the "volta," Italian for "turn," in which the last section of the poem (e.g., the final couplet in Shakespeare's sonnets) offers a different, surprising, or even contradictory twist on the rest of the text. Is there a "volta" in "The Windhover?" If so, where does it take place, how do the different sections inform or complicate one another, and what does this device contribute to the poem? Use examples from the text to support your argument.

In "The Windhover," Hopkins makes use of the sonnet form, at the same time as he, characteristically, tweaks and bends the form to suit his purpose. Like the rhyme scheme, meter, and the organization of the stanzas (Hopkins' octect followed by two tercets is his own invention, not a canonical form), the nature of the "volta" in this sonnet is idiosyncratic. For one, Hopkins has, arguably, split the traditional single "volta" into two, as suggested by the division of the poem into three, rather than two parts. Yet rather than two distinct "turns," what we have here is one motion broken down into two, we might say, "gestures." Thus the first tercet, which via its diction and placement within the narrative seems to "substitute" for the hawk's swooping down on its prey, simultaneously, as the reader likely only realizes upon encountering the final tercet, picking up the thread introduced by the phrase "my heart in hiding," enacts a subtle abstraction from the direct, experiential material that occupies the octect (i.e., the sight of the flying kestrel). The final tercet also, however, marks a turn, or an inflection, in the course of the poem. Its tone is a radical departure from the fever pitch of the previous stanza, in which the speaker's speech seems almost on the point of being overwhelmed (e.g., the syntactical breakdown of "Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!"). The tone is somber, reflective; the "ah my dear" strikes us as closer to a sigh than the implicit shout "O, my chevalier!" Into these two tercets, distinct yet woven into one whole by their shared rhymes (DCD CDC), we are pushed squarely into the productive tension between these two emotional registers. As suggested by the final image of bursting embers, the force, even violence of ecstatic experience—if we can face it—might just leave in its wake the rich, fertile sillion in which life can grow.