The Full Text of “Hawk Roosting”
The Full Text of “Hawk Roosting”
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“Hawk Roosting” Introduction
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"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.
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“Hawk Roosting” Summary
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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.
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“Hawk Roosting” Themes
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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.
The hawk knows this, and comments on the way that nature seems to be perfectly designed to facilitate the hawk’s hunting. Nature is “of advantage to me,” it says, and describes itself as the product of “the whole of Creation.” "Creation" here refers to both nature and the entirety of existence, while also alluding to a religious worldview. This religious element is relevant to the poem because much of human morality is based on or informed by religion (and vice versa). The mention of Creation speaks to the hawk’s prowess, but also to the incredible way that nature evolves to create the conditions for its creatures to flourish—even if those same creatures are essentially killing machines.
The hawk insists upon its rightful place within the natural order by describing the prey that it holds “in my foot” as part of “Creation” too. The hawk understands that both it and its prey have their roles to play, even if one seems easier to stomach than the other. In other words, the hawk’s capacity for violence is as natural as things that seem more innocent: flowers or puppies, for example!
This understanding that killing and violence are an integral part of nature informs the hawks’ attitude and personality. It rejects human understanding and morality, claiming that it has no need for “falsifying dream[s]” or “sophistry.” Sophistry is the use of clever but false arguments, which the hawk, acting in accordance with its true nature, has no need for. As such, humans are wrong to project their moral frameworks—especially the equation of violence with evil—onto the natural world. Nature, insists the hawk, is governed by its own laws.
That’s why the hawk has only “one path”; it’s one true way is that of a killer—killing is its nature. And that’s why the hawk states that “Nothing has changed since I began […] I am going to keep things like this.” Its way of being is innate and natural, and it will continue to be this way, stoking fear in the hearts of its prey. The poem, then, explores nature by focusing on one small part of it, the hawk. Through giving voice to the hawk, the poem insists on the way in which nature is both miraculous and violent. It argues that violence and innocence, in the natural world at least, coexist in balance—and that human moral frameworks don’t really apply accurately to creatures like the hawk.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-24
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Hawk Roosting”
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Lines 1-4
I sit in ...
... kills and eat.The poem begins by launching straight into the hawk's interior monologue. The hawk is personified throughout the poem, given capacity for thought, language, and expression. This leads to a kind of contradiction that runs through the poem: the hawk's killing nature is beyond human reasoning, and yet the poem can only express this nature through human language.
The hawk sits at the "top of the wood," surveying its kingdom. Similarly, as a bird of prey, it sits at the top of the food chain, and its high vantage point represents this superiority. Its closed eyes capture the way in which it inhabits its nature completely—it is at ease with itself, acting instinctively. The end-stop at the end of line 1 reinforces the way in which the hawk will act only when it feels it needs to—it won't be hurried by anything else.
The caesura after "inaction" creates a similar pause to the end-stop, carrying the same connotations. Here, the hawk starts drawing a distinction between the way that it thinks and the way that humans do. It indulges in no "falsifying dream"—it sees the world according to its true nature—implicitly criticizing the way that humanity imposes a false morality on the idea of violence. In this poem, violence isn't evil, it's just a normal part of the hawk's world. The diacope and alliteration in "hooked head" and "hooked feet" emphasizes the sharpness of the parts of the hawk's body, suggesting its violent nature. In line 4, the hawk states how it sometimes "rehearse[s] perfect kills and eat[s]" when it sleeps. Even in dreams, then, the hawk inhabits its true nature.
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Lines 5-8
The convenience of ...
... for my inspection -
Lines 9-12
My feet are ...
... in my foot -
Lines 13-16
Or fly up, ...
... off heads - -
Lines 17-20
The allotment of ...
... assert my right: -
Lines 21-24
The sun is ...
... things like this.
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“Hawk Roosting” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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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 footThis stanza talks about the process of "Creation" that has gone into making the hawk such an effective killer. The patterning of the /f/ sound suggests precision and helps the reader focus on the hawk's individual parts, all of which work in accordance to the bird's innate nature, producing a deadly killing machine.
Other instances of alliteration are more subtle, as in the phrase "allotment of death" in line 17, in which the /uh/ sound is quietly repeated. Other times, alliteration happens in the blink of an eye, as in the phrase "it is all mine" in line 14 and the phrase "My manners." All these examples point to alliteration as a means of binding lines together, the tightly wound sounds mimicking the hawk's finely tuned body.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 3: “h,” “h,” “h”
- Line 6: “a”
- Line 8: “f,” “f”
- Line 11: “m,” “f,” “m,” “f”
- Line 12: “m,” “f”
- Line 13: “f”
- Line 14: “I,” “I,” “i,” “i”
- Line 15: “i,” “i”
- Line 16: “M,” “m”
- Line 17: “a,” “o”
- Line 19: “Th,” “th,” “th”
- Line 24: “th,” “th”
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Allusion
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Antanaclasis
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Apostrophe
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Diacope
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Personification
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Assonance
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"Hawk Roosting" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- The Wood
- Falsifying
- Buoyancy
- Creation
- Sophistry
- Manners
- Allotment
- Assert
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “the ,” “wood”)
A wood is a substantial gathering of trees. It is pretty much the same as a forest, though forests are usually considered larger than woods.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Hawk Roosting”
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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.
In terms of how the poem unfolds, the poem starts by setting the scene, with the hawk biding its time at the "top of the wood." Stanza 2 looks at the way nature seems perfectly calibrated to aid the hawk's killer instinct. The third stanza discusses the way that the hawk's body itself is perfectly suited to that same aim, whereas the following stanza differentiates the hawk from the "sophistry" of mankind. In the final two stanzas, the hawk talks in almost philosophical terms, staking its claim at the top of its ecosystem.
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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. In fact, since meter might suggest human artifice, the poem instead employs tightly controlled but erratic stresses, which mimic the hawk's instinctual, highly calibrated movements.
Line 3, for example, uses stress effectively to create a sense of the sharpness of the hawk's head and beak:
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
The way that these stresses are clustered together gives them a subtly violent sound, suggesting the killing power of the hawk.
Similarly, line 9 uses stresses to convey the tight grip that the hawk holds onto its branch with (also subtly suggesting the tight grip that it can hold its prey with):
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
The two stresses at the end of the line here give the line a sense of firmness, hinting at the hawk's power.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Hawk Roosting" doesn't have a rhyme scheme. A poem with neat rhymes might have counteracted the poem's picture of the hawk's capacity for violence and killing—it would have seemed too clean, too human. This approach has a roughness and unpredictability that matches the hawk's way of being.
The only perfect rhyme in the poem occurs in the first stanza. Indeed, the reader could be forgiven for then expecting a scheme based on this rhyme to follow in the later stanzas. Lines 3 and 4 rhyme "feet" with "eat":
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.This rhyme occurs in the hawk's dream, as if rules of the poem have been suspended for the moment. Here, the perfect rhyme coincides with the hawk's own dreams of perfection. The sound of the rhyme embodies the "perfect kills."
Because of this early moment of rhyme, an attentive reader might scan the rest of the poem to see if there are other rhymes. In fact, the poem includes some moments of slant rhyme that could almost be glossed over. There's "trees" and "me" in the second stanza, "slowly" and "body" in the fourth stanza, "death" and "direct" in the fifth stanza, and "began" and "change" in the sixth stanza. These instances seem to flirt with the idea of rhyme, without fully getting there. Just as the poem lies somewhere in the division between humans and non-humans, its use of rhyme also lies between rhyme and no rhyme.
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“Hawk Roosting” Speaker
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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.This section conveys the way in which the hawk feels a kind of ownership over everything that it sees below.
The use of personification also allows the poem to implicitly critique the way that humans think about the world. The hawk has "no falsifying dream,"and indulges in no "sophistry" (clever but false logic) or "manners" (unnecessary niceties). In other words, the hawk as a speaker is very different from a human speaker. Although its main task in life is killing, it's not depicted as evil. Rather, it exists as a part of nature that is outside human morality.
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“Hawk Roosting” Setting
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The poem is set within the hawk's natural habitat: "the wood" (which is pretty much the same as a forest). The poem opens with the hawk sitting at the top of a tree, its eyes closed in a state of rest. Stanza two expands on the setting, with the hawk noting the way that the "high trees" and "the air's buoyancy and the sun's ray" all seem perfectly suited to its way of being. In other words, the natural setting is perfectly attuned to the hawk.
But there's another dimension to the setting, too. The poem is very much an interior monologue, set within the mind—or the imagined mind—of the hawk. So in terms of setting the poem is as much about the hawk's psychology as it is about the actual landscape. This comes across in abstract lines like "There is no sophistry in my body," as well as more figurative lines, like "For the one path of my flight is direct / Through the bones of the living."
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Literary and Historical Context of “Hawk Roosting”
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Literary Context
The English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is considered one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. His arrival on the scene with his 1957 debut, The Hawk in the Rain, was a shock to the system of British poetry; Hughes's raw imagery challenged the dominance of more restrained and formal poets like Philip Larkin. To this day, Hughes remains one of the most widely read poets in the English language.
"Hawk Roosting" first appeared in Lupercal, Ted Hughes's second collection of poetry, in 1960. Like much of Hughes's work, this book is both reverent and unsentimental about the natural world, seeing it not just as a source of wisdom and beauty (as the 19th-century Romantics like William Wordsworth often did) but also as a place full of instinctive violence and danger. Animals also appear throughout Hughes's poetry (most famously in the "Crow" series of poems), where they often symbolically reflect the human psyche.
Hughes was deeply influenced by the work of his wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath. Over the course of their (often tormented) marriage, the pair produced a rich, unsettling body of work. It was Plath who typed up Hughes's first manuscript for The Hawk in the Rain, and who convinced him to submit it to a first-book contest judged by Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. The manuscript won first prize, and its publication in 1957 propelled Hughes to international recognition.
Historical Context
Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd in Yorkshire, England, in 1930. The poems of Lupercal (like much of his work) are influenced by the rural landscape of his upbringing. Hughes's father served in World War I, and the shadow of both world wars also informed Hughes's observations of the natural world.
Over the course of his long and prolific career (which ran from the 1950s until his death in 1998), Hughes also saw wild social change. He began publishing his poetry during a period of rapid post-war urbanization and industrialization. Britain had a booming manufacturing industry in products as diverse as ships, cars, metals, and textiles, but with this boom came increasing pollution. Hughes's poetry, with its interest in wild nature and animal instinct, might be read as a skeptical rejoinder to a post-war enthusiasm for civilizing, scientific progress.
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More “Hawk Roosting” Resources
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External Resources
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A Reading by Hughes — Hughes reads the poem in his powerful Yorkshire accent.
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Plath and Hughes Interviewed — A fascinating discussion with Ted Hughes and the American poet (and Hughes's wife) Sylvia Plath.
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More Poems and Biography — Resources from the Poetry Foundation on Hughes and his work.
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Ted Hughes at the British Library — More resources and a biography of Ted Hughes, from the British Library.
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A Documentary about Hughes — A BBC show about Hughes' life and work.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Ted Hughes
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