Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes
Uploaded by terati on Nov 12, 2006
Ted Hughes was an award winning English poet in the 20th century. He was one of the few successful innovators that had his own personal poetic technique, of animal symbolism, as he was deeply involved in the observation of the world of creatures which in turn confronts the behaviour and existence of human kind itself. This premise of animal connotation, highlighting human temperament, was his niche, receiving immediate recognition from his audience.
Hughes uses the poem “Hawk Roosting” taken from one of his collections “Hawk in the Rain” in 1957 to make a delineation of human behaviour, through vivid imagery, cruel and violent, conveying the beauty and horror, understanding the hearts of nature and mankind, utilizing much attention to evocative details and eloquent language.
His work is characterized by its austere portrayal of the crueler aspect of nature. This is clearly demonstrated in the manifestation of the powerful predator, the Hawk, perched upon a tree, his vigilant beady eyes surveying the earth’s surface, for his next victim, while the earth faces upwards for his inspection. Here, the word “inspection” likens a military image of Generals inspecting their soldiers; the subjects in turn exist solely to serve. This emphasizes the enormity of the depth of preeminence the hawk considers himself to be, which recapitulates the philosophy of Hughes, articulated in his early poems about the disposition of mankind being equivalent to that of the animal kingdom.
In describing the beauty of the hawk, his “hooked head and hooked feet”, the poet seems to espouse the honorable and prestigious predator in a raw, belligerent and repugnant description of killing and power, “perfect kills and eat”. Here, we see the hawk, even in his sleep plotting massacre and turmoil on earth. This gives an emergence of totalitarianism, as he says “no arguments assert my right”. The implication of this sentence seems to convey the power and addiction to dominate everything around him and bringing death to anything on the ground that dares to defy his mandate.
In Hughes virtuoso performance by using mystic symbolism, he employs a deeper effect of egotism by the lines “It took the whole of creation, to produce my foot, my each feather, now I hold creation in my foot”. This reinforces a sense of arrogance as he sees himself as the pinnacle of creation, the centre of the universe, in the idealization that everything revolves around him. As he contemplates on the...