The Windhover The Windhover "The Windhover" is a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). It was written on May 30, 1877, but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection "Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins". Hopkins dedicated the poem "to Christ our Lord". "Windhover" is another name for the common kestrel ("Falco tinnunculus"). The name refers to the bird's ability to hover in midair while hunting prey. In the poem, the narrator admires the bird as it hovers in the air, suggesting that it controls the wind as a man may control a horse. The bird then
The Bird in Borrowed Feathers feathers. Froissart's Chronicles have a certain Friar John advising church leaders that their possessions depend on temporal rulers and illustrating the lesson with a story of a bird that is born featherless until all the other birds decide to furnish it with some of their own. When it starts to act too proudly, they threaten to take their feathers back. Such stories addressed themselves to various kinds of pride and had given rise to the Latin idomatic phrase "esopus graculus" (Aesop’s jackdaw) that Erasmus recorded in his "Adagia". But the story has also been used to satirise literary plagiarists in