A Trinitarian Reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’

Abstract

Abstract The rhetorical and emotional verve of ‘The Windhover’ reflect not the moment of stasis of Christ’s cross but the energy of Trinitarian interrelation in creation. Readings of the sonnet usually foreground the second divine person. Countering such a perspective, this essay rehearses the Scholastic theology and the Scholastically based faith that the poet took for granted in the original moment of experience and in the moment of composition, and so reads the sonnet in a more fully Trinitarian way. For Hopkins the energetic dynamic of love and relation within the Trinity is that into which he is drawn via the creation made through Christ, the Word (John 1:3, Col. 1:16), and as used here the energy of the sonnet form is his response to this. The Athanasian Creed and the ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ are identified as neglected Trinitarian intertexts. Hopkins believed, in Ignatian terms, that Christ ‘labours for me in all things created on the face of the earth’; and so, in the poem, Christ works dynamically through the Holy Spirit, ‘the fire’ (l. 10) who is Love itself, the vector of bird–poet interrelation, engaging him with the windhover and awakening his delight. The sonnet is the poet’s open acknowledgement of the love of the Triune tri-personal God which greets him every moment in the humblest glories of creation.