Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Blaðsíða 202

202
WINDY WORDS: TOWARDS A PNEUMATIC LINGUISTICS
II. Morning’s minion
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, …
The first line of Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ (1877) declares the
burden of the sonnet, to be resolved and completed in terms which
I shall claim are indices towards a much wider, transcendent
domain. The first line sets the framework for this completeness: the
casual adverbial of time, this morning, is transfigured by its repetition
into the immanent morning, the king-dom of daylight. But now
the repeated pattern m-n-n of morning demands minion, and Hopkins
accepts the proffered word – language speaks through him. The
beloved underling, minor accident of the morning, a small, long-
tailed, wind-blown European falcon variously called a windhover or
a kestrel, takes from the morning the burden of the poem.
In spite of Hopkins’s metrical characterization of the poem,
“Falling paeonic rhythm, sprung and outriding,”15 the first line is a
regular iambic pentameter, but to be so it ends in the middle of a
word. For a brief moment the King is named, but it is as if this
moment had never been, as if the language had bridled momentarily,
instantly to recover and herald the dauphin, the prince of the
kingdom, Christ our Lord to whom the sonnet is dedicated, the
beloved chevalier (line 11), riding on the wind. The morning, the
kingdom of daylight, not mentioned again after the second line,
remains the unspoken subject of the poem; and of this kingdom the
king remains hidden throughout, behind these forms, Aquinas’s
latens veritas (Britain 1962: 257). All that is said of the grace, power
and beauty of the little falcon harks back to the unsaid.
The reverberations16 are intense, and yet they subside as the
sonnet progresses, to the mundane, the ‘shéer plód’ (line 12) of
man’s treading. And as the day fades into the evening in which this
morning’s morning is remembered, the same beauty is echoed in
the dying embers of the evening fire, and with a sigh, Ah, my dear,
the poet addresses again the beloved being that listens to him,
15 Hopkins, 1941: 29. For the metrical note, see p. 106.
16 Not, alas, a reflex of verbum, unless the reader wishes; language has bridled again.
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