“Towards an Unknown Region” for the Windhover series. — I am not spectacularly rel

“Towards an Unknown Region” for the Windhover series.
—
I am not spectacularly religious, but one of my prized possessions is a copy of my dad’s college poetry book, with his notes for Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Windhover”. There is something so free about that poem. Reading it, I have the same sense of peace that I feel watching swallows dance across blue sky. It’s a blue poem—blue like heaven, like the way Renaissance artists used lapis lazuli to represent the divine. Blue, like joy is sometimes.
—
“(To Christ our Lord)

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom 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: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”
—