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Plough
Down Sillion Music is a music publishing company created
to administer the works of J.A.C. Redford. The name
of the company is derived from a poem, The Windhover,
by the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
A
hallmark of Hopkins style is his gift for illustrating
transcendent ideas with metaphors drawn from sharp observation
of the natural world. The subtitle of his sonnet The
Windhover ("To Christ our Lord") reveals both
the object of Hopkins faith and the primary metaphor
of the poem.
The
words "plough down sillion" are found in the
first line of the third stanza of the poem. A sillion
is a furrow of ground, the little ditch that is made
when a plow cuts the dirt in preparation for planting.
When Hopkins writes that "sheer plod makes plough
down sillion shine," he is saying that even the
most basic human effort is somehow sacred; hard work
hallows or sanctifies the plow in the furrow. Why does
he say this? His heart has been "stirred"
by watching a falcon in flight, and he has seen the
soaring, diving bird as a metaphor for Christ's life
and sacrifice. Why should we be surprised ("no
wonder of it"), says Hopkins, if nature points
beyond itself to Him; even the merest of human activities
means something more than meets the eye, containing
a kind of sacred, transforming power. How much more
then the works of God? And why should we wonder that
"God made flesh" should die? Even the coals
in a fire must break themselves open first, before spilling
forth their light.
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