A Summary and Analysis of Ted Hughes’ ‘Hawk Roosting’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Hawk Roosting’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied poems by the English poet Ted Hughes (1930-98). Published in his second collection Lupercal in 1960, the poem is unusual in that it is spoken by the hawk itself. This bird of prey asserts its dominion over the whole of the natural world, making no apologies for its predatory acts of hunting and killing other living things.

Before we offer an analysis of the poem’s prominent themes, here’s a stanza-by-stanza summary of ‘Hawk Roosting’ – a poem which, like many of Ted Hughes’ greatest, explores the unremittingly brutal reality of the natural world.

Summary

The poem begins with the hawk describing how he sits at the top of the forest with his eyes closed. He does nothing: he experiences no false dreams as he sleeps, practising how to kill and eat his prey in the most perfect and efficient way.

He praises the ‘high trees’ for their convenience. Up here, the air is buoyant and light, and the sun is strong. These are both useful to the hawk as he looks for prey, the contents of the earth below him facing up towards him so he can examine it.

His feet, he tells us, are fixed firmly on the bark of the tree branch on which he sits. Alluding to the religious idea of divine Creation of all living things, the hawk declares that his feet and his feathers are the product of all of his creative effort. It is as if he is the pinnacle of God’s achievement.

Now, though, the hawk himself holds all of Creation within his foot, standing atop the world as he does. Sometimes, though, if he flies up into the sky and flies around, it is as if he is making the world spin. The hawk sees himself as possessed of godlike power.

He certainly kills like a god, slaughtering whatever he wishes wherever he wishes, because every living thing belongs to him. What you see is what you get with the hawk: he makes no false or deceitful arguments to excuse his behaviour (‘no sophistry’). His version of such polite ‘manners’ is to tear the heads off his prey.

This, the hawk declares, is how death is meted out among nature. In the path of the bird’s flight, the living are a form of collateral damage, killed as the hawk leaves a trail of bodies in its wake. He doesn’t need to make any arguments to justify his behaviour.

The sun is ‘behind’ him. There’s an ambiguity in this phrase, since it can mean two things: both that the hawk can see his way to his prey because the sun is not in his eyes, but also that the sun – that powerful source of life filled with a quasi-divine significance – seems to support the hawk’s destructive actions, or to be fully ‘behind’ him in what he does.

And certainly, the hawk intends to keep things working in his favour: he refuses to release his strong hold over the natural world. In all the time the hawk has existed, nothing among nature has changed. His keen eye has ensured that nothing has been allowed to change.

Analysis

In an interview with the London Magazine, Ted Hughes remarked that the bird in ‘Hawk Roosting’ had been ‘accused of being a fascist’ and ‘the symbol of some horrible genocidal dictator’. Hughes went on to clarify that what he had in mind when he wrote the poem was that ‘in this hawk Nature is thinking. Simply Nature’.

Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, in one of the best early studies of Ted Hughes’ work, Ted Hughes: A Critical Study, remark that the language of ‘Hawk Roosting’ is different from Hughes’ other poems in which he attempts to ‘perform an empathy with the animals’. Instead of a human speaker trying to enter into the mindscape of an animal, in ‘Hawk Roosting’ we find a poet completely inhabiting that animal’s worldview: the hawk is the speaker.

As such, we get a hawk’s-eye view of his dominion, rather than a description of the majestic appearance of the bird, viewed from the outside. The bird’s tone is detached to the point of being callous.

Indeed, the language of the poem is cool and almost ‘official’ or bureaucratic at times: as many critics have pointed out, the hawk begins the poem using many urbane and abstract Latinate words which assert his dominance (and dominion) over other living things in terms far removed from the world of nature: ‘rehearse’, ‘convenience’, ‘inspection’, and ‘sophistry’ are coldly impartial words for the bird to use and suggest how cool-headedly confident he is that he faces no competition or resistance anywhere in nature.

Similarly, the hawk is positioned almost as a god: he is on top of the world almost, surveying it all from those ‘high trees’; he kills whatever he pleases, without facing any punishment; and no sooner has he described his body in relation to (divine) Creation than he’s suggesting that he himself ‘hold[s] Creation’ within his foot, like a god with the power to stamp out whatever is beneath him.

But we should bear in mind both Hughes’ title – the hawk is roosting rather than hunting or killing at the moment of the poem – and his own assertion that the poem is his attempt to describe ‘Nature thinking’. The poem is meditative, the hawk calm and still. True, every line is filled with the potential for menace, and the hawk reminds us of the violent ferocity of which he is capable. But the poem at this moment seems to be a meditation on nature by one of nature’s own creatures.

Ted Hughes’ other poems, such as ‘Pike’, similarly show how nature has existed on earth in much the same form for millennia: just as the ‘aged grin’ on the pike has been there seemingly forever, so nothing has changed in the hawk’s universe since he – and all hawks before him – ‘began’. The hawk talks as if he has created the universe around him, and in a sense, he has: he has evolved to have an advantage over many other animals with which he shares the forest and its environs.

Form

‘Hawk Roosting’ is written in unrhymed quatrains, without a set metre. It is somewhere between free verse and a more formal structure, reflecting the careful poise and control of the hawk but also his relaxed, self-assured view of himself and everything he has dominion over.