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
Hopkins comes out of the gate swinging, so to speak, with these opening lines. The density of patterned sound, nearly every sound seemingly setting off a chain of echoes, reverberations, and variations, is rich enough to reward the most careful attention. Developing along with and by means of this network of sounds is an equally dense set of metaphorical associations. It is, frankly, confusing at first, but also exhilarating, like watching a performer gear up for some feat of daring, though what it is exactly we're not yet sure. The phrase "morning morning's" alone tends to make one double-take: the repetition is strange enough, but the order makes it even stranger (significantly, "morning's morning" strikes one as more natural, with the possessive coming first, yet in fact makes far less sense). We try, that is, because they're two of the same, to take them as a unit, but that little apostrophe 's' stops us. We find the possessor it goes with, believe for a moment we've found the subject of "I caught," allowing us to fit the words we've read so far together into a unit of meaning, and find instead what we have is a metaphor for something we have yet to see. Each word of these lines bears this level of detailed reading, but the gist should now be clear: we are forced into an epistemological, semantic, and syntactical uncertainty (what do we see? how does it fit together?), as though continually expecting another step under our feet and finding only thin air. By the time the "real" subject of the poem—the first word in the poem we can take literally—shows up, we're liable not to recognize it, right away, as the stable ground we were searching for. The sounds of that second line are so intricate—demand so much of our attention—that "Falcon" arrives more as a new inflecting set of sounds than a noun with a real-life referent.
In this way, we are led into a different manner of reading than we might be accustomed to; "The Windhover," from the outset, firmly rebukes a meaning- or analysis-centered approach. If we feel at a loss during that first line, Hopkins seems to suggest, it's because instead of attending to the words in front of us we're off searching for whatever it is we imagine they must be pointing to. This is meant to be humbling, to some extent: we're forced to admit that we don't in fact know what it is we're looking for, and to simply try looking around instead. After all, the speaker doesn't seem to have been out looking for a kestrel, and there's reason to doubt that he could have seen what the poem describes if he had.
...My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Many of Hopkins' techniques—relentless alliteration, sing-song-y rhymes ("ing" is a particularly clear example, for this poem)—are more commonly used for comedic, exaggerated, or ironic effect by other poets. But Hopkins rarely deploys them this way. It's very difficult to pull off, stuffing one's poem as full of tricks as Hopkins does without becoming gimmicky, losing the reader's interest, or simply coming off like a bag of hot hair. Thus it's easy to miss here, when Hopkins makes use of the ironic, slightly silly tone of the internal rhyme "Stirred for a bird." It's difficult to say why exactly a rhyme seems silly, or why some strike us as haunting, or glib, or melancholy. Here, perhaps, the comedy lies in the fact that both the sounds (aural) and the words (on the page) are extremely close to one another—almost too close. "Stirred" is also (and here Hopkins' fantastic ear is on display) technically a single-syllable word, but it hasn't always been, and though this is subjective (as is all close reading) that single syllable seems just slightly stretched, like a one-and-a-quarter-syllable word. As a result, despite their similarities in sound, the quantities of that sound are somewhat mismatched, which often causes a rhyme to sound dopey (think of "I'm a poet and I didn't even know it;" one reason this sounds silly is that to make it rhyme one has to read the rhythm of the words "know it" in an unnatural way).
The second half of the line, strikingly different in tone, is best understood as a revision of, perhaps rebuke to, the first. It can be glossed roughly as, "No, that's not right, it's not the mere bird that stirred my heart, but the mastery, majesty, and beauty of its flight." Despite the confidence projected by the emphatic latter half of the line, we can't help but notice the vagueness of "the thing," which suggests that the speaker still, in fact, isn't exactly sure why the bird has him so stirred.
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.
It should surprise us, to some extent at least, to find the same speaker who just three lines ago ("...and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!") was near-incoherent with excitement opening the final stanza with "No wonder of it." It almost seems as though he might be casting some doubt on the significance of the experience described in the first two verse paragraphs, perhaps chastising himself for getting so worked up over something so ordinary. But not only would that not be a very interesting or compelling end to the poem, were it the case, it's also not convincing once one digs a bit past the surface of this stanza. The tone isn't deflated, or mournful, or despairing: the somewhat somber "d" and short "o", "w", and "n" sounds of the first line, passing through the fertile mix of sounds in "sillion," open up into the long 'i' in "Shine." The spare yet overtly poetic "blue-bleak embers," coming, as it does, right before the soft (note the lack of an exclamation point) "ah my dear," which reads like a sigh, or an aside, generates a sense of intimacy, as though now instead of a piece of the world the speaker is sharing a private vision of his own. It's an ending at once bleak and shot through with hope. After all, after embers "gash gold-vermilion," they go out, die. The "no wonder" is the speaker's acknowledgment that beauty is indeed common—which doesn't imply that it's easy to "catch"—to an afternoon walk as well as to toil, pain, even death. What measure of consolation that gives one is a personal question (possibly a question of faith).
