The Windhover

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Religion in Victorian England

For centuries before Hopkins’s birth, the Reformation brought about tremendous upheaval to religious life in Europe. The Reformation signaled a break from the near-complete domination of the Catholic Church in Europe for centuries. In the 16th century, the Reformation made its way to England with the formation of the Church of England, a Protestant church opposed to the Catholics. This split eventually led to the banning of Catholicism in England that lasted until 1829.

Hopkins’s conversion not only to Catholicism but to the Jesuits, who made up an extremely devout branch of the Catholic Church, was a radical move in the mid-19th century. His conversion severed his ties to his family and led to him living an estranged life. By becoming Catholic, he risked his reputation, his career, and his social status, and by becoming a Jesuit he went down a path of complete religious devotion that would ultimately lead to an inner conflict about the role of poetry in his life. This conflict is reflected in the poem when read with a biographical lens.

Romanticism to Victorianism to Modernism

The Victorian era in poetry stands right between Romanticism and Modernism, perhaps the two most influential artistic movements of the modern world. Romanticism stood for an embrace of sublime nature—almost a deification of nature. It also stood for the embrace of the individual and an authentic expression of feeling. Victorian poetry incorporated some of these qualities, but it did not share the same unbound feeling of expression the Romantics held. It also began to dive deeper into social issues and embraced a return to a more agrarian time instead of the ever-evolving mechanical world post-Industrial Revolution.

Modernism also embraced Romanticism’s focus on the individual and feeling over reason, and it evolved the Victorian pessimism about where the modern world was going. However, Modernism introduced much more fragmentation and abstraction to poetry, distinguishing it from its predecessors.

Hopkins’s poetry, while mainly Victorian, merges all three of these eras. He focuses on introspection and the individual’s relationship to feeling, yet he expands the tradition of poetic meter, inverts structures, and juxtaposes various images without explanation, similar to Modernist poetry. Because of this style, Hopkins is a useful poet to study when trying to understand the shift between poetic eras and movements.