A Study Guide for Ted Hughes's "Hawk Roosting"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ted Hughes's "Hawk Roosting," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535824583

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Hawk Roosting

Ted Hughes

1960

Introduction

Hawk Roosting is from Ted Hughes’s second book, Lupercal, published in 1960. It is one of the earliest poems in which Hughes used animals to imply the nature of man and to spark thought about just how much of man’s behavior is instinctual, as opposed to how much of man is ruled by his divine, or God-like, side. The hawk, who is the first-person speaker of this poem, speaks entirely of instinctual actions, giving examples of actions that are natural to hawks but repugnant to creatures of conscience: my manners are tearing off heads, he says, and the one path of my flight is direct / Through the bones of the living. The stark lack of emotion in this voice, along with the intelligence of the word choices and the pride the hawk feels for itself, have led some readers to believe that the author’s intention in writing this poem was to glorify violence, or at least to make violent behavior acceptable. Hughes answered this charge directly in a 1971 interview. Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk Nature is thinking. Simply Nature. It’s not so simple because maybe Nature is no longer so simple. Whether or not the poem expresses approval of the behavior that its speaker describes is debatable; a strong argument may be presented for each