Hughes` Poem Essay, Research Paper
y outset, it is clear that the hawk is in control. The poem begins assertively with the pronoun I. The hawk is so secure in his position that he is able to announce the fact that he is resting, inaction, with his eyes closed. There is no falsifying dream – he has nothing to hide – between his hooked head and hooked feet. The repetition of hooked puts the reader on guard – it sounds slightly sinister. This idea is confirmed when the hawk goes on to say that his dreams are single-minded: he rehearses perfect kills. He is portrayed almost like a military dictator. The irony in the statement My manners are tearing off heads is intentional: the hawk actually seems proud of the fact that he does not worry about the way he eats, about how violently he rips up his victims before consuming them. He is so proud that ‘manners’ have ceased to matter. Someone in his unassailable position does not need to consider whom he might be offending. The statement simply emphasises his sense of absolute superiority.
Hughes published a number of animal poems during his long and distinguished literary career; these were often (in fact, almost always) harsh and vigorous, painting a picture of Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ – violent, grim, and unsentimental, but at the same time remorselessly true to itself. In today’s poem, Hughes uses the thought-processes of the hawk as a metaphor for the mind of every megalomaniac who ever lived – the poem resonates with dictatorial phrases and turns of expression. The hawk lives according to the rules of its own morality (’No arguments assert my right’), in a world where might is right. ‘I kill where I please because it is all mine’ – violent, yes, but also chillingly insightful. The massive egotism running through the poem is, again, telling in its implications for the human world. Yet the unstated theme lying underneath the hawk’s soliloquy is this – that the hawk is a product of Nature; its ‘personality’ is (ultimately) dictated by Nature, and hence, somehow, proper to itself. On the other hand, for human beings, untrammelled power is (Hughes seems to say) twisted and sick, leading only to tyranny and oppression. A final note: the stark contrast between the imperial majesty of Tennyson’s eagle and the vicious tyranny of Hughes’ hawk is striking – using virtually the same basic image, the two poets paint drastically differing pictures which are, nonetheless, no less true for being worlds apart in their truth. thomas. PS. Hughes died last year at the age of 68, soon after publishing ‘The Birthday Letters’, a deeply moving recollection of his troubled marriage with the equally celebrated poet Sylvia Plath (who committed suicide). His successor as Poet Laureate has not yet been announced.