A Note on Hopkins' Plough in "The Windhover"

Anyone who chooses to write on Hopkins' "The Windhover" does so against the background of a body of critical writing that is as formidable as it is lacking in consensus. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any English poem of comparable length that has been the subject of as much concerted explication. In 1926 I. A. Richards wrote on it in The Dial, and discussion has continued unabated for the seventy-five years since then (even to the inclusion of a volume of essays devoted solely to this sonnet), ¹ so much so that it is now almost de rigueur for commentators to begin their work with a variation on the ancient modesty topos, wondering aloud whether there is anything new to say about the poem at all. ²

The purpose of this note, however, is not to propose yet another unravelling of one of the famous cruxes of the poem, but to suggest a hitherto unnoticed source for an image in the final tercet, that contained in the words "shéer plód makes plough down sillion / Shine." Although the line is far from being one of the most problematic in the poem, it is not without its difficulty, and has consequently been the subject of some dispute—dispute that John Pick rightly places among the poem's "minor skirmishes." ³

As most readers will be aware, the disagreement turns on whether it is the plough or the sillion that is made to shine—in other words, whether we should paraphrase the line as "sheer plodding activity makes the plough shine as it works down the sillion" or whether it should be "the sheer plodding activity of ploughing makes the ploughed-down sillion to shine." In spite of Yvor Winters' somewhat pedantic faultfinding, ⁴ either interpretation is grammatically possible, through the omission of an article before plough if that word is read as a noun, or the omission of an inflectional ending if the word is taken as a participle (used adjectivally).

Elisabeth Schneider's "dogmatic" exposition of this poem will admit no plurality of meaning that cannot be readily accommodated within a unified total interpretation: she is particularly concerned to disallow conflicting meanings of the word "Buckle" ⁵ ; other critics, however, are generally happier to accept a variety of interpretations, as can be seen, for example, in Antony Easthope's enumeration of no fewer than sixteen "ways of reading" in a single article. ⁶

There is, of course, no inherent contradiction in having both plough and sillion shine in the same activity, and much to recommend such a reading, for it makes clear that however tedious the activity may seem it has beneficial results both for actor and for actant. In this case, there is clearly a fruitful ambiguity in Hopkins' syntactical arrangement.

In support of a reading that sees the newly turned furrow as shining, critics have drawn attention to an entry in Hopkins' Journal in which he remarks upon "the near hill glistening with very bright newly turned sods." ⁷ In general, recourse to Hopkins' other writings, and particularly his Journal, has proved a rich and valid source for interpreting individual poems or experiences. As an aside, it is a Journal entry that provides the best gloss on this poem's opening words, and insists that we read "I caught" not as "I caught sight of" but as "I inscaped": "All the world is full of inscape, and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose . . . looking out my window, I caught it in the random clods and heaps of snow." ⁸

Nevertheless, however fruitful the Journal may be in general, with respect to the image of plough and sillion, more telling allusions can be noted that suggest the primary meaning of the line is that it is indeed the plough that shines. The first such allusion has been quoted on a number of occasions; it is the...