Photo from A Different Voice, a thoughtful blog I discovered while searching for this image.

Here’s a poem I’ve treasured for thirty years. I remember vividly my first encounter with Hopkins, at the end of a Victorian Poetry class with Dillon Johnston at Wake Forest University. We’d gone through Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold–Arnold who left poetry for the world of literary criticism, alas–and at the end of the term Dr. Johnston had brought us to the most radical and experimental poet of them all: Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins’ ideas of “instress”–the vital, emphatic force that holds and moves all creation from within–and “inscape”–the irreducible uniqueness, the thisness of each created being–were deeply inspiring to a young man in whom a passion for poetry, some might say a passion for passion itself, was coming into its first full flowering. Dr. Johnston seemed to me to have a very deep, if somewhat guarded connection with Hopkins’ intensity. His explications of these poems were very influential for me. I subsequently did my M.A. thesis on Hopkins and music.

Hopkins’ poems can be difficult to understand. His own friends, one of them a future poet laureate of England, found them difficult. Hopkins did his best to clarify these works without watering them down. And now, 150 years later, we’re attuned to certain kinds of poetic experimentation that the late Victorians were not. Still, it may take two or three readings or listenings to begin to get what he’s saying. The rush of words and stresses in Hopkins’ poetry performs a specific mimetic function. Hopkins is not being difficult just for the sake of being difficult or precious. He’s trying hard, as all great poets do, to transcribe and enact the parts of experience that seem especially meaningful, where the rich implications of any event reveal not only the human activity of meaning-making but the essential meaningfulness of being itself.

Some notes about the poem may be helpful. Hopkins added the tag “To Christ Our Lord” to make it clear that the Windhover is a symbol or allegory for Christ. Whatever one’s own beliefs, the urgent particularity of Hopkins’ observations here have a special beauty and power, I think. Also, in my commentary following the poem, I neglected to define chevalier. A chevalier is a knight.

My recitation is in response to a request from Chris Gill, Chief Information Officer at Gonzaga University. Chris was one of my classmates at the 2005 Frye Leadership Institute. I’m over two years late responding to Chris’s kind request, but reconnecting with him at EDUCAUSE 2007 reminded me that I owed this colleague and friend a small token of my thanks for his support and encouragement over these years, years that have brought changes and challenges to both of us. So here you go, Chris. I hope you enjoy the results.

EDIT: As Jonathan’s comment indicates, I am mistaken in my commentary. The kestrel is a falcon, not a hawk. I regret the error, and I’ll fix the commentary as soon as I can. Thanks to Jonathan for that correction.

SECOND EDIT: Seems these things go in two-year cycles for me. It took two years for me to record this podcast, and then two more years to fix the commentary in response to Jonathan’s comment. But fixed it is. My thanks once again to Jonathan for setting me straight, even if the course correction took two more trips around the sun.