Kingbird Don’t Care

One day, Fr. Gerard had a moment with a bird. It was a sunlit morning when he saw a kestrel hover magnificently in the wind as a knight rides a horse.

And being Hopkins, he wrote a poem about it:

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.

He thought, and I tend to agree with him, that this was one of his best poems. Commenting on it in a letter, he wrote, ‘I think, but as that is the best thing I ever wrote I should like you to have it in its best form.’

Then E. E. Cummings (yeah capitals and periods. Deal with it) comes along and acts as though he read about those moments and then took up his pen and wrote the equivalent of: “Oh you’re stirred for a bird are you? Well kingbird don’t care”:

Maybe this kingbird is still Hopkins’s “chevalier” since “he’s the soul of chivalry.” Likewise, there’s a strange conflation between Christ and bird since Cummings’s bird is “I AM” and Hopkins’s poem is dedicated to Christ and we’ve never really decided whether that “chevalier” is the bird or the “Christ the Lord” of the dedication.

Though different species, the kingbird itself seems to be a tongue-in-cheek version of the kingfisher in Hopkins’s poem “When Kingfisher Catch Fire.” While the kingbird constantly cries its own inscrutable presence, the kingfisher

The natural selving of animals and things in Hopkins is taken up and reversed by the deified selving of the kingbird. Hopkins reserves divinization for the human person who “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is,” but Cummings takes the divine name of Exodus and the cryptic response of Christ in John’s account of the arrest in Gethsemane and gives it to a bird who “doesn’t give a damn.”

Whereas a lovelier fire bursts from Hopkins’s descending bird, Cumming’s ascending bird reveals fearless love in the way it “looks and leaps upon the air.”

It is as though Cummings notes that Hopkins’s “heart in hiding” was “stirred for a bird” and then muses whether the bird could possibly care about the wan Jesuit watching from below.