How does the poet use language in the poem, The Windhover?

The language in The Windhover is often confounding, relying more on rhythm and poetic devices than on specific and known meanings for individual words. Hopkins makes use of foreign language words, specifically the French words "dauphin" (2) and "chevalier" (11) to obscure a straightforward expression of the speaker's feeling. The poem's language is dictated by sound over sense, meaning that Hopkins frequently makes up words and challenges the reader to identify with the speaker's emotions through poetic devices like exaggerated alliteration, erotic asides, and frequent exclamations. For example, as the end of the octave, the speaker says, "My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!" (7-8). Here, though the syntax is disturbed, the speaker is still able to communicate his feelings of awe for the bird and for God through the use of assonance, rhyme, interruption, and exclamation. In this way, the poem's language represents Hopkins's idiosyncratic style that was not appreciated until after his death: interested in translating the power of God into poetry, his word choice is frequently confounding but markedly unique and melodious.