The Windhover

I encountered The Windhover in graduate school, and it made such a strong impression, but was so daunting a work, that I waited nearly three decades to set it. Hopkins combines a poetic vocabulary drawn from his study of Welsh with a sense of thesacred inherent in his calling to the priesthood. The language Hopkins used to depict the central image of the poem, that of a falcon hovering on the air, is already so musical that it took some time for me to come to a harmonic vocabulary that Ithought might express the essential ecstatic nature of the poem. Hopkins wrote of an inscape in his poetry, an inner landscape revealed behind the words themselves. The poems were intended to touch the unique interior life that words can only describe. For me, this is the realm where music is strongest. As thepoet and storyteller Hans Christian Anderson wrote, where words fail, music begins. As composers of words and music, we are called upon not merely to set words, but to enhance the inner landscape of the poetry. If we fail to reveal the inscape ofthe poem, we have likely not done justice to the poet and his work. The world of the The Windhover opens at dawn as the poet views the falcon spiraling in the air, morning’s minion, riding on the rolling level underneath him steady air… in his ecstasy! The poet is stirred for a bird, the achieve of; the masteryof the thing! In its flight, the falcon is so essentially itself, so free on the air that it expresses its Christ-like nature. Hopkins’ dedication of the The Windhover is To Christ Our Lord. In the culmination of the poem, the falcon’s beauty, valor, and the ecstasy of flight are buckled together as a holy fire breaks forth, sending forth a spray of embers, which gash gold-vermillion. In the musical setting, The Windhover takes flight after the declamation of the poem and enters into the realm of the bird’s ecstatic flight. Words fall away and the music rushes toward its close with the free cry of the falcon, soaring on the wind.