The Morning
The speaker makes a lot of the fact that he catches sight of the windhover in the morning. In case you're not a morning person, let us tell you something about it: the early morning light gives eve...
Royalty
Right from the beginning, the windhover reminds the speaker of something royal. It seems so regal and so proud. The speaker seems to think that the bird is a kind of king of beasts. But the windhov...
Christianity
Okay, we all know that Hopkins was a very devout Jesuit priest. So devout, in fact, that he stopped writing poetry for a long time (even burning his early poems) because he thought that priests sho...
The Everyday Stuff
Part of Hopkins's poetic project was to show how even things that we see every single day, like a bird flying, could be totally, mind-blowingly amazing if looked at in the right way—like, say, by...