Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!

The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray (floating )
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -

I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:(using clever but false arguments )
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

"Hawk Roosting" is a poem by Ted Hughes, one of the 20th century's most prominent
poets. In the poem, taken from Hughes's second collection, Lupercal, a hawk is given
the power of speech and thought, allowing the reader to imagine what it's like to
inhabit the instincts, attitudes, and behaviors of such a creature. The hawk has an air
of authority, looking down on the world from its high vantage point in the trees and
feeling like everything belongs to it. The poem is particularly keen to stress the way
that violence, in the hawk's world at least, is not some kind of moral wrong—but a
part of nature. "Hawk Roosting" is one of a large number of poems in which Hughes
explores the animal world.

 “Hawk Roosting” Summary

o I, a hawk, sit at the top of the forest with my eyes shut. I'm doing nothing, holding no
false dreams between my head's curved beak and the curved talons of my feet. In my
sleep, I dream about killing my prey perfectly and eating them.

The trees are so well-suited to my way of being! The air I float on and the sun's light
seem perfectly adapted to my way of life, and the earth faces the sky so I can inspect it.

My feet are gripped tightly to the branch. It took millions of years to make my foot, and
every single feather. Sometimes, I hold other products of Creation in my foot when I
catch them.

Other times I soar high into the sky, revolving the world around me as I spiral up in slow
circles. I kill when and where I want, because the world belongs to me. I have no use for
clever but false logical thinking: my politeness is ripping the heads off my prey—

That's how death gets dished out. And my one true way takes me straight through life,
causing others to die. I need no logical justifications for my actions.

I fly between the earth and the sun, and it has always been this way. My gaze has not
allowed anything to changed. I will keep things like this forever.

Nature and Violence

In “Hawk Roosting,” Ted Hughes imagines the interior thoughts of one of the great birds of
prey: the hawk. The poem is told entirely from the perspective of the hawk, which
is personified as having the powers of conscious thought and a command of English. What the
hawk lacks, however, are human qualities like mercy and remorse: it is ruthless and direct in its
thoughts about hunting prey, though this violence is presented matter-of-factly, as simply part of
who the hawk is. Imagining what goes on in the mind of the hawk facilitates a deeper meditation
about nature, which the poem presents as both majestic and fearsome. Violence, the poem
 suggests, is just as much a part of nature as is beauty, and the natural world isn’t subject to
human notions of morality.
The hawk is a killer, and part of the poem’s aim is to make clear just how natural this
violence is. To that end, the opening line depicts the hawk sitting at the “top of the
wood,” symbolizing its place at the top of its ecosystem. And the poem is graphic in
its depiction of the bird’s violence throughout—the hawk refers to its “Manners” as
“tearing off heads” and its flight path as “direct / Through the bones of the living.”
The hawk’s life is literally governed the “allotment of death.” In other words, it
is meant to kill.

Alliteration

Alliteration is used to strong effect in "Hawk Roosting." The first example is in the /h/ sounds of
line 3:

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

The /h/ sounds give dramatic force to the image, and require quite a lot of effort in terms of the
reader's breath (each /h/ requires exhalation). This alliteration makes the image more vivid,
emphasizing the hooked shapes of the hawk, and carries with it a quiet sense of violence.

Another strong example is in lines 11 and 12, this time with an /f/ sound:

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

 Form

"Hawk Roosting" is made up of six quatrains. That said, this is the only real formal constraint
placed on the poem—there is no rhyme scheme or strict meter. However, the quatrains,
combined with the poem's extensive use of end-stopped lines, do give the poem a sense of order
and patterning. This plays into the discussion of "Creation" in the third stanza. Just as nature has
created the hawk's perfect "foot, my each feather," so too has the poem achieved its own
deliberate structure.
Meter

"Hawk Roosting" does not follow a regular metrical scheme, but is rather written in free verse.
That doesn't mean that the poem isn't attentive to the use of stresses, but that there is no overall
governing meter.
Personification

The speaker in this poem is none other than the hawk itself. The hawk is personified throughout,
giving the poet (and the reader) the chance to imagine the interior thoughts of this fearsome bird
of prey. In particular, this technique is useful because it allows the poem to explore differences
between the hawk's attitudes and behaviors and those of humankind.

Throughout, the hawk has an air of arrogance and superiority. It conceives of itself as perfect,
and sees nature as a world perfectly tuned to suit its killing ways. It is, in many ways, the
authority of its environment. In the second stanza, it says,

The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray

Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.