Hawk Roosting Questions and Answers By Ted Hughes

BROAD QUESTIONS

1. Write an essay on the use of animal imagery in the poetry of Ted Hughes with special references to Hawk Roosting.

Or,

Attempt a critique of the animal imagery in the poetry of Ted Hughes with suitable textual references to Hawk Roosting.

Hughes’ animal poems are among the best in his work, and among the finest in the whole range of English poetry. The imagery in these poems has its own appeal. This imagery shows Hughes’s enormous powers of observation and an exceptional capacity to embody his observation in words. The imagery in his poems is at once graphic and realistic; and the language which Hughes has employed in describing the various animals shows a striking originality and felicity. The emphasis in this imagery is on the vitality or energy of the animals concerned and also on the violence, the fierceness, and the cruelty of most of those animals. This animal imagery, with its emphasis on the destructive powers of certain animals, has largely contributed to Hughes reputation or notoriety as a poet specializing in the poetry of violence. At the same time, it has to be noted that, while the primary purpose of this animal imagery is to convey to as Hughes’ Visual impressions of the animals whom he has actually observed; there is a symbolic purpose behind this imagery also.

In the poem Haw Roosting, it is the fierceness and cruelty of the Hawk which are emphasized. The hawk accomplishes as he pleases because unworld is his domain To tear off heads is a routine performance by him. He is an arbiter of life and death. The allotment of death” is his privilege. The one path of his flight lies directly through the bones of the living. Rarely has any poet described the killer-hawk in this kind of metaphorical style. Both in respect of theme and imagery, Hawk Roosting has a striking resemblance to The Hawk in the Rain. In The Hawk in the Rain the hawk is depicted as-perched effortlessly at a height with his still eye, and with his wings, holding all creation in a weightless quiet. This hawk is steady as “a hallucination in the streaming air”. In the final stanza of this poem, the Hawk untinatifate is described in striking language: “the pondero us shires crash on him.”

The symbolic significance of the imagery in the animal poems. can not be simply ignored. It is the symbolic significance which imparts to this imagery a certain depth and profundity. Hughes does not write about animals as if he regarded them not as animals. He finds in them certain qualities which link them to human life. The symbolic animal imagery thus yields a significance which can enhance our understanding of ourselves. Hughes believed that the strength of animals lay in their instinct and precise function. The animals, according to him, are much more adapted to their environment than human beings. Besides, Hughes also believed that animals were not like man, undermined by a false morality of incapacitated by doubt. A bank is a hawk, whereas a man has ambitions to be God-like-and is, therefore, permanently frustrated. A hawk is always in its own element even when it dies an elemental death.

In the poem Hawk Roosting, the poet does not praise the hawk so much as he denigrate man by comparison. The hawk is here seen as vastly superior to man who is unable to accept Nature for what it is and, instead, tries to tame it by giving it philosophical names. The hawk does not have man’s debilitating intellectuality or man’s slavish obedience to rules. In the poem The Hawk in the Rain, the bird sits effortlessly at a height, while the speaker in the poem is assailed by the ferocious wind which thumbs his eyes, throws his head to the bone, thus, Hughes puts a human being at a disadvantage by comparison with a bird.

According to critics, no poet has observed animals more accurately than Ted Hughes has done; and Hughes depiction of the animals observed is remarkably vivid startling, and yet mythful. The animals observed and described by Ted Hughes in his poems cover a wide range. The hawk, the thrush, the pike, the Jaguar, the skylark, the horse, the cat, the mouse, the bull, the pig, the otter, the bullfrog, and several others figure in his poems. Indeed, it is told that the world of animals is Hughes favourite territory. The ancient Greek fables, known as Aeshop’s Fables, have existed for centuries, and these fables depict animals in a way which throws a flood of light on human nature. But, Hughes treatment of the animals is different: it is highly poetic, highly fanciful, highly symbolic, highly significant, highly expressive, highly illuminating, and highly “modern” both in content and in style. Hawk Roosting really establishes Hughes reputation as a poet of the world of animals. The poem depicts a hawk’s eye-view of the world. 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. Nor does he wholly admire Nature as D.H. Lawrence does. In fact, in all his poems about animals Hughes tries to fuse both his admiration for Nature and his horror of nature into a single response which might be described as “awe”.

2. Consider Ted Hughes’ Hawk Roosting as a modern poem. Or, What are the modern features in the poetry of Ted Hughes? Illustrate your answer with suitable textual references to Hawk Roosting.

When Ted Hughes started writing poetry in the nineteen fifties, the aftermath of the Second World War still lengthened into shadow on most of British Poetry. This tendency is clearly reflected in what is as the poetry of the movement. Ted Hughes reflects or represents some of the characteristics which are called ‘modern’. ‘Modernism’ is a literary term that is usually applied to literature and art after the First World War, though some literary historian have located the beginning of modernism in 1890″. Modernism is a period or an era which has introduced a number of innovative feature and techniques in the field of British poetry. Experiment with new poetic style and technique, use of starting imagery, realism, anti-romanticism, scope for diverse interpretation of a literary work, objectivity, complexity of thought and ideas, criticism of contemporary society-these are some of the features of modern poetry.

Although Hughes’s poetic style shows unmistakably the influences of G. M. Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and his wife, Sylvia Plath, yet his is at the same time one of the most original styles in modern poetry. One characteristic that is noticeable in his first two volumes of poetry, namely The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal is his tendency to use tough vocabulary and to put word together in unusual combinations. Indeed, the reader has to make a strenuous mental effort to get the meaning of the word combinations which he employs, and which are strongly reminiscent of G.M. Hopkins’s talent in this respect. Hughes has experimented with poetic styles and techniques in his pomes and evolved a new simple style in Hawk Roosting. Hughes is not incapable of using simple vocabulary or of putting words together in simple combinations which is one of the significant characteristics of modernism. Most modern poets and writers practice simple styles. Similarly, Ted Hughes has written poems in which the vocabulary is absolutely simple, and in which he has made a truly felicitous use of words. The whole of the poem called Hawk Roosting is an example of this kind of style. Nothing could have been simpler than the following lines: “The Sun is behind me. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. Iam going to keep things like this. One of the most conspicuous modern features of Hughes’s poetic style is an abundance of simile, image, and metaphor, in his poems; and, what is more, these similes and metaphors are of a bold and daring kind which few poets would venture to use or even to imagine. Graphic and realistic imagery is another striking features of Hughes” modernism in Hawk Roosting. The lines “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”-are famous for Hughes use of imagery. To him, imagery is an effective device to bring out the thematic concern of his poem Hawk Roosting. The image of hawk is an animal image which highlights the degradation of human beings when they are compared to animals. Criticism of contemporary society or human beings and their follies and foibles constitutes one of the essential attributes of Hughes’s modernism in the poem Hawk Roosting. Here Hughes has severely criticized or castigated the lapses, shortcomings and lacunaes inherent in human beings and eventually he has society. That’s why, the whole universe in the poem Hawk Roosting has been looked upon from the hawk’s perspective and here the hawk is the representative of Nature. Denigration or degeneration of human beings has been hinted at by the use of animal imagery in the poem Hawk Roosting.

Objectivity or impersonality is one of the distinguishing features of modern poetry and this is clearly perceptible in Hughes’ poem Hawk Roosting. In this poem, the poet has not spoken about his own feelings. emotions and sentiments like the Romantics, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge. Like other modern poets. Hopkins, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, he is anti-romantic, impersonal and objective in his treatment of the subject-matter. In Hawk Roosting, the bank is the poet’s poetic persona through which he is propagating or enunciating his ideas and views of the world. In this poem, whatever he has expressed or ventilated, he has done so through a tees of objectivity or depersonalization. Like T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes believed, “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, it is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality.”

Implexity of thought is an important attribute of modern pastry and it is obviously tangible in Hughes’ Hawk Roosting. It is virtually impossible for the readers to bothom the actual meaning of the poem at the first time. They can only unravel or expose the inner meaning or subterranean implication after reading a few times. If they do not read or study the poem deeply, they will not be able to understand or comprehend the inner or underlying, meaning of the poem. A typical modern poem is subject to different and divergent explanations or interpretation. Similarly, the poem Hawk Roosting invites a lot of explanations of its meaning. It may be looked upon as an objective poem or an anti-romantic poem or realistic poem or a philosophical poem. There is not limit or boundary as to the actual meaning of the poem. The poem has been abruptly and it has ended suddenly. It is an open ended poem. That is why, the readers can interpret this poem from their own viewpoint or perspective. In the light of these characteristics of modernism mentioned above, Hawk Roosting is a specimen of typical modern poem.

3. Write a critical appreciation of Ted Hughes’ Hawk Roosting. Or, Write an essay on the characteristics of Hughes’ poetry as revealed in Hawk Roosting.

The poem “Hawk Roosting”, first published in “Lupercal” (1960) presents the meditation of the hawk from his own point of view and that’s why, it is told in the first person narration or description. Hughes’ Hawk retains all of its predatory characteristics and yet symbolises the Darwinian aspect of Nature, that is Nature “red in tooth and Claw” and Nature which believes in the survival of the fittest.

“Hawk Roosting” as a very powerful poem. It is also very controversial since many critics have accused of Ted Hughes of making the hawk symbolic of fascism. But, hawk is a symbol of Darwinian nature rather than of fascism. But this is the Nature that Tennyson describes in his In Memoriam as one “red in tooth and claw”. The hawk becomes a spokesman for Nature and speaks in accounts close to those of Walt Whitman when he permit Nature to speak through him: “I know I am solid and sound/To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow. /I knew I am deathless/I see that the elementary laws never apologize……/I exist as I am, that is enough……./ My foothold is tenon’d and mortise’d in granite”. It is such a thought that makes the hawk describe himself as the centre and the sole concern of all Creation, as if the earth, the sky, the water, and all the creatures as prey were made for him.

Keith Sagar has also compared hawk with Jehovah, and this comparison was first suggested by Hughes himself in the London Magazine interview. For Hughes, as Keith Sagar interprets the poem, believes that “All efforts to understand Nature in terms of human morality are as doomed as job’s effort to understand his God. His successes decided to remake God in their own image, separating out and exalling the Logos, leving the dark side of God, unacknowledged, maranding destructively as Satan, Serpent, dragon, God, unredeemable Nature and the ghosts of all the pagan gods and goddesses. And it is this process which Hughes sees as having more to do with the sad state of the world than the adoration of job’s savage God which Richards strangely imagines to have characterized the last two thousand years.”

There is, however, an irony underlying the hawk’s selfcentredness as well a his belief that everything is for his convenience. Nature and hawk itself is a part of the ruthless. Nature he claims to symbolize. Commenting on this aspect of the poem, Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts write, “This while ‘Nature’ in the last three lines is speaking in the simple certainty that it services only itself, the hawk is rehearsing its own necessary blindness what the hawk sees as a straight line with himself intact at each end of it is really of course, a cycle, that includes his own death.”

“Hawk Roosting” is the only poem is Lupercal in which Hughes speaks with the voice of an animal and endows this anti-human creature with a kind of human consciousness. The concepts that Hughes puts into the mind of this bird are consistent with his predatory nature as well as the Nature and God he symbolizes. The brutality of the bird, for example, is clearly conveyed through the choice of several abstract but witty words such as “rehearse”, “convenience”, “advantage”, “manners”, “allotment”, “inspection”, and “permitted”. Coming as elliptical words and phrases they actually contribute to the poem’s effect of brutal hardness.

The poem “Hawk Roosting” is written in the form of a monologue or a soliloquy. The speaker here is a hawk, which is a bird of prey, attacking smaller birds and eating them to feed himself. The hawk is here to be imagined as speaking and expressing his ideas about himself and the universe of which he is a denizen. The hawk speaks with a sense of authority, and with the fullest possible confidence in himself. Indeed, the readers are astounded by his egoism and his selfcentredness. His egoism is boundless and infinite. The hawk belongs to the animal world and this poem, therefore, belongs to the category of Hughes’ animal poems.

One of the distinguishing features of the poem Hawk Roosting is that it reveals the hawk’s egoism and his sense of power, it is the image of violence and brutality in the poem. The hawk is proud of his power to kill; and here he reminds us of the pike in another poem by Hughes. All the fierceness and brutality of the hawk have been summed up in a few lines such as the following: “I kill where I please because if is all mine”. The hawk’s whole business in life is “to tear off heads”. His whole concern is to distribute death. Hawk Roosting is one of those poems which show Hughes’s interest in the violence and the brutality which are the rule, not the exception, in the world of Nature.

Hawk Roosting is one of Hughes’s simplest poems. Its thoughtcontent is simple and its language is simple too. Indeed, this is one poem which offers no difficulties at all even to the uninitiated reader. The words are simple, and they have simply been arranged. There is no complexity, and no intricacy, in the thought; and there is no complexity or intricacy in the arrangements of the words or in the syntax. Thus, there is nothing at all to bewilder or to puzzle us in this poem.

4. Write a critical appreciation of the poem Hawk Roosting.

Or, Comment critically on the use of animal imagery in the poem Hawk Roosting.

The entire poem is narrated in the first person & hence it is looked upon from the hawk’s perspectives. Talking to himself on the branch of a tree, the hawk considers himself to be at the centre of the universe. He thinks that he has the answers to all the mysteries of the universe. He is the embodiment of authority and domination. Everything is under his supervision. He can kill whatever he likes and wherever he likes. He asserts that nothing has changed since his creation because he does not permit anything to undergo transformation. He thinks himself to be God.

Keith Sagar tells us that the poem which really established Hughes’s reputation and got into all the anthologies was “Hawk Roosting”. He agrees with the general view that this poem is a brilliant “tour de force” in entering the consciousness of a hawk-a bird of prey. But at a deeper level, the hawk becomes a spokesman of Nature himself and echoes the accents close to those of Walt Whitman (another American poet who allowed Nature to speak through himself). Nature speaks through Tennyson also: “Nature red in tooth and claw”, a loveless, careless, ravenous Nature. Tennyson had built his faith on the assumption that “love was Creation’s final law”. When Nature

showed him, her reality, he could only cry: “Are God and Nature their al strife?” In Hughes we find neither the admiration of Whitman nor the anguish of Tennyson. All Hughes’s animal and nature poems get their characteristic tension from his attempt to fuse into a unified response both admiration and horror. The reconciling spirit might be described as one of “awe”. In “awe”, there is an element of response also.

Critics are of the view that Hughes had written this poem to denounce fascism or dictatorship in certain countries. The hawk, sitting in his nest, on a tree and talking to himself was regarded as a symbol of some horrible totalitarian dictator bent upon destroying an enemy race of people. Kings, Presidents, Dictators or Prime Ministers-one can think of any number of people whose attitude to their subjects and their communities is neatly and sharply condemned in this poem.

Critics have a deeper level to condemnation of the poem-more than individual tyrants. There are certain allusions and references which can make a reader think that the ultimate and most prominent aim of attack of the poet is none other than human beings themselves. The hawk becomes the personification of some of the condemnable qualities of the human race. We pride ourselves to thinks us as the highest creatures in the scale of evolution. Man-homo sapiens-is a basically proud race. Our myths and legends express this-the Biblical story of creation, reserving Man for the sixth day. There is no scope for doubt that all the facts of history and science support this fact. As the time goes on, this view seems to become more and more plausible. Modern man forges ahead with his scientific inventions-virtually throwing a challenge to Nature. He extends his scientific and technological powers, by eliminating a disease here, synthesizing a new form of life there; restarting fertility to deserts, throwing his satellites ever deeper into space, there is a great tendency for man to adapt the view that they do in fact, “hold creation” in their grasp. To many thoughtful people, however, this seems as a thoroughly misguided, conceited and blasphemous view. The ancient Greeks in these tragedies made frequent use of the idea of the chastisement of “hubris”, the disaster and punishment which befell men of excessive pride. Certainly a more sober look around the world with its problems of cynicism, superstition, intolerance, war, racial strife, mental disease, suicide, frustration and trivial aimless living should be a salutary check to any human being inclined to be too pleased with the progress of human race. He may realize that far more difficult problems confront the human race than can be solved by the “manners” of the hawk, determined merely “to keep things like this”.

However, it can be mentioned in this context that Hughes’s own remarks about this poem contradicts those of the critics’ and are very illuminating. He said that this poem had generally been regarded by critics as one dealing with the theme of violence. According to Hughes, this approach to his poem about the hawk was entirely wrong. He further said that this poem only represented Nature as thinking. He meant the hawk in this poem to be a representative of Nature as a whole. The hawk in this poem is not a fascist leader, but just Nature) talking to herself. In other words, Hughes merely wanted to depict the) cruelty and the blood thirstiness which prevail in Nature.

5. Examine “Hawk Roosting’ as a poem depicting violence and brutality.

Or, Bring out the elements of violence and brutality in Ted Hughes’s Hawk Roosting.

Or, Show the consistency of violence and brutality in Hughes’s animal poems, with special reference to “Hawk Roosting”.

When Edward James Hughes (or Ted Hughes as he subsequently came to be known) was just seven years old, the family moved from the town of his birth-Mytholmroyd, in the West Riding region of Yorkshire (in England)-to Maxbarough, a coal-mining town in South Yorkshire. This was a great change in the life of the boy who had begun to love his rural surroundings and who had now to adapt himself to urban life. In the rural surroundings of the town of his birth, he had begun to take great interest in animals and birds and had wanted to capture them to enjoy their company, though he never succeeded in capturing any. This interest in animals, dating from his childhood, remained with him throughout his life, and it accounts for a large number of animal poems which he subsequently wrote.

Hughes’s second volume of poems was entitled “Lupercal”, and was published in 1960. In this volume the last poem has the title of Luprecalia. The most outstanding poems in this volume are notable for their depiction of certain animals which are known for their violent and savage nature. As M. L. Rosenthal says, no poet of the past has quite managed to internalize the murderousness of Nature through such brilliantly objective means, and with such economy, as Hughes has done in poems like “Esther’s Tomcat”, “Hawk Roosting”, “To Paint a Waterlily”, “View of a Pig”, “An Otter”, “Thrushes”, and “Pike”. In these poems Hughes shows his ability to present an image or a thought in the context of violent action. In all these poems, we find a strong narrative and dramatic quality which is in no way undermined by unnecessary description or any authorial comment devoid of energy. In “Esther’s Tomcat”, we are given a most graphic picture of a tomcat attacking a knight on horseback, and throwing him down from his horse. The knight dies of his bleeding wounds. In “Hawk Roosting”, the hawk says: “I kill where I please because it is all mine”. Although, the pig in the poem called “View of a Pig” dead, yet the poem has a ferocious quality about it because of the way in which a living pig is depicted in one of the stanzas : ; Pigs must

have hot blood, they feel like ovens,

Their bite is worse than a horse’s

They chop a half-moon clean out.

They eat unders, dead cats.

M. L. Rosenthal tells that lines like these could not have appeared before World War II because such lines seem to bear the stamp of the Blitz, the Hydrogen Bomb, and the slaughter of the Jews in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Hughes’s view of nature is not Wordsworthian; it resembles the Nazi mentality. Hughes finds even the thrushes on a lawn to be a terrifying spectacle. He describes the destructive nature of these birds and their voracious apetite with no mercy.

The hawk in “Hawk Roosting” speaks with a sense of authority, and with the fullest possible confidence in himself. Indeed, we feel amazed by his egoism and his self-centredness. His egoism is boundless and infinite. This egoism finds expression in many lines like : “I kill where I please because it is all mine”. “No arguments assert my right”.

“Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this.” Even more striking than the hawk’s egoism and his sense of power, is the imagery of violence and brutality in this poem. The hawk is proud of his power to kill; and here he minds us of the pike in another poem by Hughes. All the fierceness and brutality of the hawk have been summed up in a few lines like: “Now I hold creation in my foot.” and

“No arguments assert my right”.

The hawk’s whole business in life is “to tear off heads”. His whole concern is to distribute death; and he never wavers in carrying out this task because he knows only one path, and that is the path leading him directly through the bones of the living creatures..

Thus “Hawk Roosting” is one of those poems which shows Hughes’s interest in the violence and the brutality which are the rule, not the exception, in the world of Nature. Some critics have called this interest in violence and brutality as an obsession; but that is perhaps the wrong way of looking at these poems. Violence and brutality are just one of the many themes in the poetry of Hughes, and there is nothing morbid or inhuman about Hughes’s interest in this aspect of the universe.

6. Write a critical note on the animal poems of Ted Hughes.

Or, Discuss Ted Hughes as a poet in whose work animals are one of the dominant themes.

Or, Account for or illustrate, Ted Hughes’s concern with animals in the poetry.

No poet has observed animals more accurately than Ted Hughes has done; and Hughes depiction of the animals observed are remarkably vivid, startling, and also truthful. The animals actually observed and described by Ted Hughes in his poems cover a wide range. The hawk, thrushes, pig, otter, pike, jaguar, skylark, horse, cat, mouse, bull, and several other animals figure in his poems. It can be safely said that Hughes’s favourite territory is the world of animals. But it is not just the original kind of description of animals which makes Hughes’s poetry unique. What makes it really unique is the symbolic significance which he discovers in the animals whom he observes and describes. Of course, the ancient Greek fables, known as Aesop’s Fables, have existed for centuries, and these fables depict animals in away which throws a flood of light on human nature. And yet, Hughes’s treatment of the animals is different: it is highly poetic, symbolic, illuminating and highly modern both in content and in style. His description of animals contain numerous metaphors; and these metaphors relate a particular animal to all the other creatures and also to human expressions and human concepts. His poems embody in a most intense form the typical stresses and contradiction of human nature and also of Nature.

The poem “An Otter” is less a description of an otter than an invocation of the spirit of an otter. The otter is depicted as almost the opposite of the hawk (in Hawk Roosting”) who rules the air with a feeling of authority. However, the otter, like the hawk, is a predator. An otter can put an abrupt end and to the life of a trout though, from the time of arrival of man on the scene with his trained dogs, he himself also becomes a prey. Symbolically speaking, the otter,”crying without answer for his list paradise”. Is surely, to some extent, an image of the dualism in man. The otter, like man, is neither wholly beast or wholly angel. He, too, like man, is yearning far his Eden hoe where death did not exist.

The poem which really established Hughes’s reputation as a poet of the world of animals is “Hawk Roosting”. Subsequently, this poem figured in most of the anthologies. The poem depicts a hawk’s-eye view of the world. The hawk believes that the air, sun, trees and earth are there only for his convenience; that the purpose of Creation was solely to produce him, that the world revolves at hiş bidding, and that all other creatures exist only as his prey. This proud, 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. However, at a deeper level, the hawk becomes the spokesman of Nature himself. Tennyson spoke of Nature “red in tooth and claw” and he felt 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. Nor does he wholly admire Nature as D. H. Lawrence does. In fact, in all his poems about animals, Hughes tries to fuse both his admiration for Nature and his horror of Nature into a single response : “awe”.

VERY SHORT QUESTIONS

1. What idea do you form about the nature of the hawk in the poem?

The hawk represents confidence and authority. His mind is saturated with pride, egoism and self-centredness. He is almost frantic for attaining more and more power. He also symbolizes a dictator who is arrogant, ruthless, domineering, angry and authoritative.

2. What kind of poem is Hawk Roosting?

Hawk Roosting is a kind of monologue which is taking place in the mind of the hawk. The entire poem has been narrated in the first person narrative technique. That is why, everything has been looked upon and presented from the hawk’s point of view.

3. Does the hawk symbolise in the poem?

The hawk symbolises a totalitarian, a dictator, an autocrat and an anarchist. He is out to destroy everything. He is also standing for carelessness, cruelty, hard-heartedness and blood-thirstiness.

4. Nothing has changed since I began-who is the speaker? Why has nothing changed?

The hawk who is sitting on the branch of the tree is the speaker here.

The hawk is the ruthless ruler who has absolute authority over everything. He cares for nothing and nothing happens without his permission. The hawk does not allow anything to undergo change or transformation for its own convenience.

5. No arguments assert my right-Who utters this speech? What is the right’ of the speaker?

The hawk who is resting on the bough of the tree is speaking here. The hawk says that it is his height to kill whom he pleases and where he likes. He can wander anywhere without caring for anybody. He is the absolute ruler or dictator. He thinks that he can dominate over everything.

6. On what occasion the poem is published?

“Hawk Roosting”, published in 1960, is included in Ted Hughes’s second book, Lupercal. The Hawk in Ted Hughes’ poem “Hawk Roosting” is power personified. The roosting of the hawk signifies its self-assertion. The very first word of the poem “I,” is a sign of the Supreme Ego.

7. What does the hawk declare?

The hawk declares that he sits on top of the ‘wood’ that stands for his kingdom. He ‘eyes are closed in oblivion, for at the present, for him, only he exists. His world is limited between his hooked head and hooked feet.

8. Why do you think that the hawk is in action?

He is in “Inaction’. For action does not define him, rather, he defines action. This is no falsifying dream, a castle built in the air, but the omnipresent truth. He dreams about “in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.” Therefore, it is not the basic necessity of killing and eating that concerns him, but the style of it.

9. What is the picturization of nature in the poem?

The trees are indeed convenient as they are high, enabling him to reach new heights. The air’s buoyancy enables him to float in the air; the sun’s rays lend him rays of hope. These are all metaphors for circumstances that allow the hawk to stay in the position that he is. His being up, it appears to him as if the earth is laid down for his inspection.

10. Who is the creation of God?

He is Creation personified as he professes, and by his flying up he can resolve all Creation. Creation here refers to God, as the word is capitalized. The line is a typical instance of a metaphysical conceit. As its position is topmost in the food-chain, it asserts triumphantly.” 1 kill where I please because it is all mine.” Critics have pointed out this as an instance of Fascism.

11. What does the poet mean by the term ‘sophistry’?

By the term ‘sophistry’, the poet says that the physiology in his body does not abide by any rules. His way of life pertains to the tearing off of all heads; suggesting that he is also above all moral and social laws. He decides the allotment of death. The path of his flight through the bones of the living is direct; there are no two ways about it. It is outrageously stark and true. He does not require any third person’s argument/certificate to claim his right. It existed on its own.

12. What is on the ending note?

On an ending note, he declares that the sun is behind him. He has eclipsed the sun. To put it further, the sun lives in his shadow. Nothing is constant, as times passes. The composition of the entire universe is susceptible to change within fractions of seconds. However, the Hawk states that nothing has changea es his eye has not permitted it to.

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