ellauri095.html on line 51: Hopkins’s most famous Welsh sonnet, “The Windhover,” reveals that for him this Book of Nature, like the Bible, demanded a moral application to the self. Hopkins wrote in his notes on St. Ignatius: “This world is word, expression, news of God”; “it is a book he has written.... a poem of beauty: what is it about? His praise, the reverence due to him, the way to serve him.... Do I then do it? Never mind others now nor the race of man: DO I DO IT?” One of Hopkins’s attempts to answer that question is “The Windhover.”
ellauri095.html on line 61: The Windhover (kestrel, tuulihaukka) aims to depict not the bird in general, but instead one instance and its relation to the breeze. This is just one interpretation of Hopkins's most famous poem, one which he felt was his best.
ellauri095.html on line 63: The Windhover Haukkaan tuulta
ellauri095.html on line 220: The brilliant student who had left Oxford with first-class honours failed his final theology exam. This almost certainly meant that despite his ordination in 1877, Hopkins would not progress in the order. In 1877 he wrote God's Grandeur, an array of sonnets that included "The Starlight Night". He finished "The Windhover" only a few months before his ordination. His life as a Jesuit trainee, though rigorous, isolated and sometimes unpleasant, at least had some stability; the uncertain and varied work after ordination was even harder on his sensibilities. In October 1877, not long after completing "The Sea and the Skylark" and only a month after his ordination, Hopkins took up duties as sub-minister and teacher at Mount St Mary's College near Sheffield. In July 1878 he became curated at the Jesuit church in Mount Street, London, and in December that of St Aloysius's Church, Oxford, then moving to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. While ministering in Oxford, he became a founding member of The Cardinal Newman Boozing Society, established in 1878 for Catholic members of the University of Oxford. He taught Greek and Latin at Mount St Mary's College, Sheffield, and Stonyhurst College, Lancashire.
ellauri095.html on line 546: The phrase “And birds that call/Hoarse to the storm,” invites comparison with the son’s images of the windhover rebuffing the big wind in “The Windhover” (1877) and with the image of the great storm fowl at the conclusion of “Henry Purcell” (1879). The father’s prophecy, “thy sport is with the storm/To wrestle” is fulfilled in Gerard’s The Wreck of the Deutschland and “The Loss of the Eurydice” (1878). These two shipwreck poems, replete with spiritual instruction for those in doubt and danger were the son’s poetic and religious counterparts to his father’s 1873 volume, The Port of Refuge, or advice and instructions to the Master-Mariner in situations of doubt, difficulty, and danger.
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