sprung rhythm A poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of speech, in which each foot has one stressed syllable, either standing alone or followed by a varying number of unstressed syllables. [Coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins]
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-1889), English poet, known for a number of works published posthumously, including "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "The Windhover." His work expresses an intense response to the natural world through the use of innovative rhythm and language. Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, and was educated at Oxford. In 1866 he converted to Roman Catholicism, and he entered the Jesuit order two years later. Hopkins's poems, such as "The Windhover,""Pied Beauty," and "Duns Scotus' Oxford," attempt to capture the uniqueness—or inscape, as Hopkins termed it—of natural objects, by the use of internal rhyme, alliteration, and compound metaphor.In 1877 Hopkins served as a parish priest and teacher in England and Scotland before becoming a professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, Ireland, in 1884. His unhappy years in Ireland produced a series of poems known as the "terrible sonnets." With a few exceptions, Hopkins's poems were not published during his lifetime. The first collected edition was published in 1918; a second, complete, edition appeared in 1930.
The Windhover
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom 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: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
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: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Analysis of the poem at:
"The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of prey..."
"The confusing grammatical structures and sentence order in this sonnet contribute to its difficulty, but they also represent a masterful use of language..."
"A great number of verbs are packed into a short space of lines, as Hopkins tries to nail down with as much descriptive precision as possible the exact character of the bird's motion..."
""The Windhover" is written in "sprung rhythm," a meter in which the number of accents in a line are counted but the number of syllables does not matter..."
"This poem follows the pattern of so many of Hopkins's sonnets, in that a sensuous experience or description leads to a set of moral reflections..."
"At line nine, the poem shifts into the present tense, away from the recollection of the bird. The horse-and-rider metaphor with which Hopkins depicted the windhover's motion now give way to the phrase "my chevalier"—a traditional Medieval image of Christ as a knight on horseback..."
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