Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Side 203

203
PÉTUR KNÚTSSON
embodied as the morning, the windhover and the dying gold-
vermillion embers, and all beyond these.
The Windhover:
To Christ our Lord
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
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,– the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! and the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Hopkins’s sonnet is pregnant with the larger domain in which it is
composed. I have written elsewhere of the explicit ‘indices’ that
centre a text within its horizon, and the implicit ‘pollices’ that
point to coordinates beyond that horizon.17 I have discussed the
proliferation of voices that seem to cluster around these pointers,
and associated them with the familiar concepts of discours indirect
libre and “unspeakable language.”18 Hopkins offers the sprung
rhythm of his poetry for bodily delivery, and he punctuates his text
with accents and small capitals accordingly; it seems he regards his
17 Pétur Knútsson 2010. Index is the Latin for the pointing finger; pollex is the thumb.
18 “With novelistic discourse language, as writing, enters for the first time into the realm of the
unspeakable … The unspeakable enters discourse, occupies it, and demands silence” (Lock 2001:
75). – “This emancipation of the single word, its diastasis in a plurality of voices, also inevitably
ushers into the text a host of gestures from outside, transforming it with multitextual plurality:
the explicit reference to another text, the bent finger pointing over the local horizon, demands the
same mute intonation” (Pétur Knútsson 2012: 203).
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