ENL 168: "'Hurt Hawks' and the Balance of Man and Nature"

Jolene P. Brown

Dr. A. Williamson

English 168

5 June 2009

“Hurt Hawks” and the Balance of Man and Nature

Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Hurt Hawks” tells the tragic story of a speaker who finds and cares for an injured hawk. The hawk is wounded beyond healing, and the speaker watches as the hawk fights a battle with pain and death, yet somehow maintains life for six weeks before the speaker takes it upon himself to kill it out of mercy. The hawk, a symbol of strength, is weakened by the wing’s injury, and though the injury does not kill the hawk, it deprives it of its freedom since the hawk can no longer fly. The hawk is forced to wait for a slow, painful death since it will not be killed off by a predator as it can still defend itself with its talons. The reader watches as the speaker is driven to do the one thing he would rather not do: kill the hawk to save it from a fate worse than death; ending the agonizing depletion of strength from a creature that is the embodiment of that characteristic.

There are two parts to the poem, the first that outlines the hawks fall from grace, and the second that describes death and transcendence of nature beyond the death of the hawk. The speaker describes the sad state of the hawk in gruesome detail, describing the “clotted shoulder,” with “the bone too shattered for mending” (lines 1, 20). In the first part the hawk is shown to be both physically and psychologically injured as described in lines 7-8: “at night he remembers freedom / And flies in a dream, the dawn ruins it.” The speaker endows the hawk with a memory of the freedom he once had in the sky, a freedom that has been stripped from him by his crushed wing that simultaneously crushed his spirit. However, the hawk will not submit to humility as “no one but death the redeemer will humble that head” (11) and throughout the pain maintains his arrogance. This arrogance will not get him a quicker death, notes the speaker, since “The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those / That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant” (13-14). The first part describes an arrogant animal that will not submit death or humility, not even for a quicker death, and the speaker mourns the potential lost in the strength that once was.

The second part of the poem describes the continued decline of the hawk leading up to his eventual death at the hands of the remorseful speaker. The pain that the hawk endures is matched only by that of the speaker, who would “sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk” (18). The speaker does all that can be done, feeding it and allowing it the freedom to wander over the landscape outside of a cage. For six weeks, the speaker says, “He wandered over the foreland hill” only to return “in the evening, asking for death, / Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old / Implacable arrogance” (22-23). Even in his weakest moment the hawk maintains his arrogance, not even willing to beg for the death that he needs to leave behind the suffering of his crushed wing and subsequent confinement to land. The speaker describes the bullet as a “gift” which he gives to the hawk in the twilight of the evening, and the sound of the gun triggering a relaxing fall of “Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers” but also a soaring of “the night-herons by the flooded river” that “cried fear at its rising” (25-26). There is, then, both a rising and falling at the end of the poem: as the hawk falls into death, life continues on as other birds rise in life “before it [the hawk] was quite unsheathed from reality” (27).

There is an unusual word that occurs in the poem on line 10 that can be interpreted in several different ways with each interpretation giving new meaning to the passage.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At a distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. (Lines 9-14)

The word “curs,” seems at first to be a typo, or some kind of error on the part of speaker or poet. However, analyzing the use of the word in the line through context, the word could be replaced by either ‘course’ or ‘curse.’ Each word would give a dramatic interpretation to the sentence in which it is employed. In the use of the word ‘course,’ the time that passes through the day, and the general course of events from the moment the sun rises to the next sunrise becomes a torment to the bird, that must suffer each moment without his wing. It also implies the course of suffering the bird must endure, through the shock of the injury, the pain and the realization and acceptance of the inevitability of death. When the word ‘curse’ is used instead, the day is personified: cursing the hawk either with the injury itself, with prolonged life despite the injury, or both. Both words help to express the hawk’s and the speaker’s unhappiness at the injury which is only made worse by the potential that the hawk once had. Further, the incapacity of the current state when compared to the former strength, freedom and arrogance, is even worse than the pain. The current state is a tragedy in the truest sense since all the potential is lost as the hawk must continue the course of pain and incapacity, and suffer the curse of incapacity without the immediate release death.

The hawk is a symbol of strength: “The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, / The wing trails like a banner in defeat” (1-2). In the first line the speaker refers to the wing as a “pillar,” the source of architectural strength, and the metaphor is changed in the second line as the reader is told of the injury; suddenly the pillar is a “banner in defeat.” It is clear that the battle has ended for the hawk as not even the “cat nor coyote / Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons” (4-5) The implication is that the hawk still has the ability to fend off predators, but the predators will not do the hawk the honor of fighting him, since there is other meat to be had. The value that the hawk has as a warrior with honor is suddenly that which will keep him from dying, and ultimately is the same honor that will prevent him a swift warrior’s death. His honor is then lost with the injury as he is valueless even to predators as food.

The tone of the poem is affected a great deal by the poet’s use of free verse combined with long lines. The poem becomes more of a story, as the reader can imagine being told this story by someone who has experienced it first-hand, and it becomes a more personal experience for the reader. Consonance is used more in the first part of poem giving the reader a constant reminder of the jagged pain of the hawk, and the unsettling feeling experienced by the speaker. The word ‘strong’ is used twice in line 9 emphasizing the importance of strength to the creature and how the speaker admires this quality in the hawk. In the second part of the poem, assonance is the emphasis with descriptions such as “implacable arrogance” (24), “eyed with the old” (23), which soothes the ear in preparation for the death to come. There is still consonance, however, and the contrast between the two maintains an uncertain tone leading to a repetition of ‘r’ sounds in the last two lines allowing for a sound of closure at the end of the poem.

The poem is representative of the relationship between man and nature. The title itself implies a larger scope of meaning, since the word “hawks” in the title implies a plurality that does not exist in the poem. This absence generously opens the scope of the interpretation to metaphor applying itself easily to nature. The hawk as a symbol for nature embodies all those characteristics important for the survival of all creatures: strength, honor, glory, arrogance and grace but these things are not permanent and can be lost quickly, without warning. The poem makes no mention of how the hawk was injured, this cause itself is irrelevant to the point the poet is trying to make. The injury weakens the bird, but does not strip it of all its qualities since it can still defend itself from predators and arrogantly defy death. It takes the work of man to allow the creature passage into a world without pain, but even the death of the hawk cannot put a stop to nature as the flock of birds react to the sound of the gift-bullet and take to the sky. The fall of one bird leading to the rise of an entire flock: in helping with death there is a birth of life.

Works Cited

Jeffers, Robinson. “Hurt Hawks.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2, third edition. Editors: Jahan Rmazanin, et. al. W.W. Norton and Company, New York and London, 2003. Pages 416-417.