"My heart / Stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing"

[larryhammer]

If "The Windhover" were adapted as a picture book, who would you want to illustrate it?

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

William Blake?

[larryhammer]

Blake doesn't do flying very well, though -- his figures are too solid.

---L.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Just the other week, I was relating the fact that (according to the OED) a historical synonym for "windhover," and occasional term of opprobrium, was "windfucker."

. . . I don't think that would work as a children's book. :-P

[larryhammer]

Er, no. Amusing as it is to contemplate, but no.

---L.

[janni.livejournal.com]

It could, however, be an interesting place to start worldbuilding for stories in several other genres, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe we can get Miyazaki Hayao to come out of retirement for the job. --Matt

[larryhammer]

He'd get the flight down, that's for sure. And something of the inscape. I worry about the landscape, though.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

As far as I know it wouldn't contradict GMH canon to set the poem over an endless forest of poisonous fungi...

[larryhammer]

Aside from the plough down the furrow? Perhaps not ...

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

That's literally there in the scene?! I think I need to rewatch season 1.

[larryhammer]

The narrator doesn't technically say the plough is there, in the landscape under the bird, but the regions where a kestral was called a windhover were still heavily agricultural at the time. OTOH, we are clearly not supposed to assume the sunken fire mentioned immediately afterward is in the same place, so a argument can be made that the ploughman isn't either -- one that possibly has the better of it.

I still think the shift in perception, from the stooping falcon to the plough in the field below it, would make a good illustration. (But so could a shift entirely into the narrator's imagination, possibly sitting in a pub, late at night, looking at the coals.)

---L.