When wind blows over water, ripples are generated on the water surface. These ripples can be regarded as perturbations of the wind field, which is modelled as a parallel inviscid flow. For a given wavenumber k, the perturbed streamfunction of the wind field and the complex phase speed are the eigenfunction and the eigenvalue of the so-called Rayleigh equation in a semi-infinite domain. Because of the small air-water density ratio, rho(a)/rho(w) epsilon << 1, the wind and the ripples are weakly coupled, and the eigenvalue problem can be solved perturbatively. At the leading order, the eigenvalue is equal to the phase speed c(0) of surface waves. At order epsilon, the eigenvalue has a finite imaginary part, which implies growth. Miles (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 3, 1957, pp. 185-204) showed that the growth rate is proportional to the square modulus of the leading-order eigenfunction evaluated at the so-called critical level z = z