Critical Appreciation of Ted Hughes' "Hawk Roosting"

Hawk Roosting is an Animal Poem Depicting Violence and Brutality

Hawk Roosting, included in the volume Lupercal is Ted Hughes’ one of the best poems like View of A Pig, Wodwo, Crow etc. It is Ted Hughes’ many sided, vivid, startling, and yet truthful observation. The hawk while ‘resting’ a top the wood with closed eye expresses his happy state and satisfaction. He thinks of his prey with sense of pride and authority. We will now analyze the poem as an animal poem, study of violence, depiction of Nature and its simple structure under the following heads.

            Hawk Roosting is a monologue of a hawk, a bird of prey, attacking smaller birds and eating them to feed himself. Hughes’s reputation as a poet of the world of animals to an extend relies on  Hawk Roosting which is a hawk’s eye view of the world. The egoistic hawk here asserts his point of argument  that trees, air, sun and earth are there only for his convenience; that the purpose of creation was solely to produce him; that the world revolves at his bidding; and all other creatures exist only as his prey. This egoistical hawk says:

            "It took the whole of creation

            To produce my foot, my each feather:

            Now I hold creation in my foot…………."

Thus the poem reveals to us the hawk’s own peculiar point of view and his peculiar consciousness.

            M. L. Rosenthal, an eminent critic, says that no poet of the past has quite managed to internalize the murderous quality of Nature through such brilliantly objective means, and with such economy, as Hughes has done in Hawk Roosting. Simply the poem  is about the egotism of a single minded concern with a violence which seeks no justification for itself. The hawk says that nothing has changed since his life began, that his eye has permitted no change, and that he is going to keep things like this:

            “Nothing has changed since I began

            My eye has permitted no change

            I am going to keep things like this”.

Hawk is a merciless killer and it is his device the allotment of death. It is his whim to kill where he pleases because it is all his own. The hawk’s whole business in life is “to tear off heads”. His whole concern is to follow the path leading him directly through the bones of the living creatures.

            “…. My manners are tearing off heads

            the allotment of death.

            For the one path my flight is direct

            Through the bones of the living”.

M.G. Ramanan has expressed the view that violent imagery in this poem is Hughes imperialistic sense of power and authoritarian politics. Hughes himself denies such accusation of fascist, dictatorial and the bloodthirstiness which prevail in Nature.

            However, at a deeper level, the hawk becomes a mouthpiece of Nature itself. Tennyson spoke of Nature “red in tooth and claw”; and he felt very unhappy about the cruelty that he saw in Nature. He therefore asked: “Are God and Nature then at strife?” But Hughes does not feel the anguish which Tennyson felt. Here is Hawk Roosting Hughes tries to fuse both his admiration for Nature and his horror of Nature into a single response which might be described as ‘awe’.

            Hawk Roosting is in fact an amusing poem showing Hughes’ sense of humour too. Hawk’s false sense of pride, of power and of egoism is coupled with his extremely narrow outlook. Yet it is possible that Hughes is not laughing at Hawk rather clarifying his boost. There may be no sophistry in his body, as he says; but there certainly is sophistry in his reasoning. Moreover, the thought content of the poem and its argument is simple. Farther, lucidity and simplicity in the use of language are by no means foreign to Hughes, poetic style which is a proven truth for Hawk Roosting.     

            In conclusion, we may add that Hughes has attributed to the hawk a capacity to think and even to argue a case. The hawk, depicted as an egocentric bird, may even be regarded as symbolizing man himself because man is actually the most self-important, egoistical and arrogant creature in the whole of this universe.

            Ardhendu De