Hawk RoostingTed Hughes

Ted Hughes (193O-1998) served as the British Poet Laureate from 1984 until he died, for which he received the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II. Born in West Yorkshire, he studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, later spending most of his life in Devon. This is one of many poems that he wrote about nature and the natural world. At the time of writing Hughes was living with his wife Sylvia Plath, in America.

The ‘Hawk Roosting’ is a very powerful poem and there is more to the poem then first meets the eye. Ted Hughes writes the poem putting himself into the body and

mind of a hawk. The hawk is portrayed as an arrogant

megalomaniac and Hughes is very good at showing the way the

hawks mind works in a number of different situations and in

different places.

The poem is about a hawk boasting about its power. The hawk thinks that it is the most

important and powerful creature in the world and that it controls the universe. The

hawk describes how it likes to kill| its prey in a particularly

violent way. It could be a metaphor for the behaviour of

political leaders or people in general.

The themes throughout most of the poem revolve around power, ignorance and self

indulgence. The hawk itself represents power and ignorance at the same time because he

thinks that he is the most important animal in the woods and he is ignorant to the fact that

he cannot have everything, in the poem Hughes shows this very well by using lots of

emotive language and description about how the hawk thinks.

You should compare this poem with other poems about the same themes: causes of conflict: 'The

Yellow Palm1, 'The Right Word'; nature: 'The

Falling Leaves'; death: 'Mametz Wood'.

The poet presents the hawk as powerful and destructive.

It's proud of its own perfection and efficiency.

The hawk's attitude is egotistical and arrogant. It's omnipotent in its own eyes.

Hawk Roosting

by Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

 

The convenience of the high trees!

The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray

Are of advantage to me;

And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

 

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

 

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –

I kill where I please because it is all mine.

There is no sophistry in my body:

My manners are tearing off heads –

 

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct

Through the bones of the living.

No arguments assert my right:

 

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.

My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this.

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

 

The convenience of the high trees!

The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray

Are of advantage to me;

And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

The opening line is referring to the hierarchy of the wood. When Hughes says that the

hawk is in the top of the wood he is working on a literal level, the hawk is literally on the top of the wood and figuratively.

The hawk thinks of itself as the king of the woods, he is

unchallenged and fearless.

Hughes goes on to say that the hawk wants or needs

nothing, no falsifying dream, his dreams are not

something that he wants he already has everything he wants. His dreams are his

reality.

Hughes mentions the hawk’s ‘hooked head’ and ‘hooked

feet’ next; Hughes is describing these because they are his weapons, his tools for

killing, he is proud of them because they have helped him into the position at the top of

the food chain and, as the hawk thinks, to the top of the

world.

At the end of this line, instead of just ending the sentence, Hughes has used a semi colon which

helps this penultimate line of the stanza run fluently into the last line. In the last line of this stanza Hughes writes about the hawk - in sleep rehearse(ing) perfect kills and eat. The hawk is

remembering his perfect kills and rehearsing for the next time he needs to eat, or just wants to kill.

Hughes writes ‘kills then eats’ suggesting that, to the hawk, killing is more important then eating because of his use of the word ‘then’ rather than ‘and’. Even if the hawk did not have to eat to survive he would kill,

just for the thrill.

The hawks perspective then shifts to his domain, he is saying how his

surroundings are so convenient for him. He sits at the top of the wood

using the high trees as an advantage to him so that he can see everything that is going on beneath him. Hughes

ends the sentence with an exclamation mark showing that the hawk is happy that he has secured

such a good place in the woods.

In the next two lines he is again talking about the advantages of his surroundings. The air’s buoyancy is an advantage because it means that he

can easily glide over the wood and take a look at what is happening beneath him and he has a great view of all his prey. The sun provides light, so that the darkness of the wood is lifted, so he can see all his prey. The last line in this stanza show that the hawk thinks it is more important then the Earth itself,

the hawk seems to think that the Earth is subservient to him.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

 

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –

I kill where I please because it is all mine.

There is no sophistry in my body:

My manners are tearing off heads –

“Creation,” because it is capitalized, refers not just to all that exists, but to God, since

references to God or pronouns that stand for God are usually capitalized. The understanding

of God here is less specific than the images usually accepted by

major religions.

In the third stanza, there are three mentions of the hawk’s feet. The first is a somewhat simple one, linking the hawk to its natural habitat, which is portrayed as a difficult one through the use of the word

“rough.” In the second mention, the hawk asserts that it is not just part of the world,

but the end of, the reason for all that exists.

In line 12, the hawk takes this self-important view even

further, implying that since it exists as the summation of all that is, it is superior even to

God. According to such reasoning, God and other

beings are not recognized as having any more will or desire than the tree’s bark has. The

hawk sees others as creatures performing their specific

functions, just as it performs its function when it kills.

Presumably, in this worldview, the hawk’s victims understand that it has no purpose but to

kill them.

“Sophistry” is reasoning that is clever and seems to be well-founded, but in actuality is hollow and false. When the

hawk says in line 15, “There is no sophistry in my body,” it is indicating that the body does not reason badly because it

does not reason at all; it acts. In this way, the poem seems to express the idea that any

amount of reasoning will have some falseness to it and that

the only way to avoid falseness is to avoid

reasoning.

The author has responded to criticisms that “Hawk

Roosting” seems to approve of cruelty by saying that he

only wanted the hawk to show what “Nature is thinking.”

The last line of this stanza uses language that is intentionally harsh (“tearing off their heads,” rather than a more impartially descriptive phrase like “removing heads,”

which would match the diction of stanza 2). The hawk appears quite conscious of the fact that its actions are

vicious, and almost seems to enjoy it.

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct

Through the bones of the living.

No arguments assert my right:

 

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.

My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this.

Each stanza of this poem begins with a direct,

declarative statement that is brought to a stop at the end

of the first line with punctuation. Lines such as

these are called “end-stopped lines.” An end-

stopped line that brings the flow of the poem to a halt just

as the stanza is beginning gives the speaker’s tone a cold sharpness, as if the

speaker is stating conditions and making demands rather than having a conversation

with the reader.

In line 17 this technique is used to make the hawk’s position on killing seem

absolute and undisputable. As with the earlier reference to “the whole of

Creation” (line 10), this stanza makes absolute statements such as “the one

path,” “direct,” “through” (as opposed to “into”), and “No arguments” to convey the

hawk’s unhesitating certainty.

In line 20 the hawk says that the rights it is entitled to are not the product of any arguments, implying that it has undeniable rights and that these rights are more important than anything, including God. This echoes the claim made in lines 18 and 19. Both lines emphasize a division between rationality and nature (referred to here as Creation),

implying that man, as a rational creature, is separate and

distinct from the natural world and from God.

4

In lines 1, 5, 9, and 21 this poem intermittently establishes a setting for

the hawk who is speaking. The image in line 21 is especially notable because it

does not emphasize the hawk’s viewpoint but specifically tells us about something, the sun, that is out of the range of the hawk’s vision. For the

reader who is imagining a hawk on a tree branch, this detail helps to paint a

picture, but given the hawk’s self-centred attitude throughout the poem,

that it would mention something it does not see is unusual.

To some extent, the perspective in this stanza is not just the hawk’s, but an objective point of view that is spoken through the

hawk’s “I.” This is seen in the difference between lines 22 and 23: line 22 is an impartial statement, and line 23 expresses the same

basic idea, but through the hawk’s all-encompassing ego. In making these two statements, one a passive observation and the

other an aggressive claim, this poem draws attention to the different degrees of animal mentality that it offers. The final line is pure arrogance, extending the hawk’s previous claims about being

the centre of all that came before and all that currently exists to include all that will come to be.