the answer, my friend, is hovering in the wind

My apologies for posting late (facebook has been problematic).

What is it like--the moment--that you discover your soul being? Is it ecstasy, is it "fire", or perhaps is it something divine? Sitting in a classroom, trying to chisel away at your skepticism, awaiting the moment of making your spirit animal’s acquaintance, is one thing. But catching this moment—a surreal and suspended moment—completely in nature, is quite another. The windhover that Hopkins describes, is his soaring, elated, and powerful spirit incarnate, yes—but also a porthole to the divine. His words are simultaneously dynamic and instantaneous, culminating in an epiphanic moment of utter ecstasy: “…striding high there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing in his ecstasy! then off, off forth on a swing….” (85) This is nirvana—even if just for a moment. In this moment, “[his] heart in hiding stir[s] for a bird,” and is receptive to the animal spirit world, “representative of the divine” (78). It is at first the “morning,” the “daylight,” the “dawn” (85) of a growing spirituality, which for Hopkins, is getting in tune with Christ, who “plays in ten thousand places,”(86) and who takes many forms.

Daybreak, or the dawn of awareness.  This is the moment you meet your guardian spirit (and God?).
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You can almost hear him—his elated expressions of “Oh” and “ah”—as he validates the existence and beauty of this budding religious awareness and connection (85). Then, as if to solidify the bond between man and bird, human and God, the climax begins to take shape: “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle….” Every aspect of the bird, of the man, and of the moment comes together, bound “to the time and harmony of the universe” (78) in a dive down to earth. The role of the “Chevalier” has two oddly contradictory implications: one is a French title of honor, which is a relatively high-ranking position of power and privilege, in which one has certain financial and legal rights but also certain responsibilities.

A Chevalier.  Perhaps the spirit animal is your night in shining armor.
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A Chevalier can also be a French knight or nobleman of the lowest rank (perhaps loyalty to the king is the path to becoming privileged and wealthy). Such nobles were required to counsel and indeed pay homage to their king (see encyclopedic description of a Chevalier). Many were often required to take part in a “blood tax,” which, much like the connotation of this tribute, is both an act of loyalty and of sacrifice (both typically religious connotations as well). In the context of Hopkins’s The Windhover, I found that the relationship between the King--politically and socially, the divine—and the Chevalier—without whom, the power of the divine does not exist—is strikingly similar to the bond between human and spirit animal. The moment in which this relationship is established, Hopkins describes, is both a moment of freedom, as illustrated in the nature of the bird’s flight, but also of binding loyalty and service and mutual reverence. In contrast, Jeffers—though clearly in awe of hawks—seems less concerned with the ecstatic spiritual connections between human and bird (or God, for that matter), and more passionately imprisoned by the physical world: “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” But nevertheless, the same unwavering loyalty to his spirit bird is present--as with Hopkins's "Chevalier".