Poems
Poem 4: 'Hawk Roosting'
Extract
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.
Location
The filmed sequences of the hawk were specially shot for the programme in the hills around Settle, with the help of the North Yorkshire Falconry Centre. The bird in the sequence is a Harris Hawk, not naturally resident in this country, but used because they are easier to train than British birds like kestrels, sparrowhawks or peregrine falcons.
Summary
'Hawk Roosting', like 'Wind', is one of Hughes's great early poems, taken from the collection Lupercal (1960). It is more than a poem about a bird of prey; it is a poem by a bird of prey - a cool chant of confidence by an animal that has no serious competitors and literally has the world at its feet - 'And the earth's face upward for my inspection'. It is a tremendous leap of the imagination on the part of the poet - to get inside the mind of the hawk and to express not how a human sees it, but how the bird imagines itself. The much-noted majesty and aloofness of a bird of prey is conveyed in the poem by the coolness and detachment of the hawk's language - 'The convenience of the high trees!', 'My eye has permitted no change'.
Unlike 'Wind', where the thoughts in the poem are blown and stretched over lines and seem to burst across stanzas, the thoughts of the hawk are far more contained within one or two lines - 'The sun is behind me. / Nothing has changed since I began.' The effect is of elegance, fantastic confidence and tremendous power; and surely there is something there of the poet's confidence in his own powers as a young and successful poet.
What Ted Hughes Said
'This piece is as if spoken by a hawk sitting in the top of a wood... the hawk is saying this poem to himself constantly over and over... and that's what keeps him in the full flush of being a hawk, being what he is, and being full of hawkishness.'
Ted Hughes - Passwords 1998
What Simon Armitage Said
'This is the universe that the bird inhabits when it's got its eyes closed... it's what it thinks about, what it dreams about.
'The type of magic that Ted Hughes is interested in would allow some people in certain civilisations to actually become certain animals, to take on the spirit of an animal... and I think this is part of his magical practice - he's becoming the animal and seeing what occurs to him. What does it feel like to think like a hawk?
'You get a lot of blood and guts in a Ted Hughes poem and a lot of violence, because nature is violent and he doesn't close his eyes to that... I think he would say that violence is one thing that reminds us of the real world and what it is to be alive in this world.'
'When the hawk is given language... when it's given the ability to explain itself... it becomes quite a terrifying prospect.'
Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998
© 2000 Channel Four Television Corporation
