Hawk Roosting

[WX6[ck]]

The poem Hawk Roosting. If you've read it, what does it mean to you? Personally I think it describes Dictatorship and/or communism. I think I'm way off but I don't know?

[Isagel]

I had to reread it. I have never thought of the poem that way. For me the hawk was more a picture of death, and the description of it captured the strange fascination human sometimes feel towards death or destruction, the power of the inevitable. The way the poem draws me to admire the hawk and it´s beauty, scares me.

But that fascination for the absolute power can of course be read as the übermensch ideal of fascism, and also show how easy it is to be emotionally drawn to the beauty of the one that hold creation in it´s foot.

I have a harder time translating it to communism way of thinking. I think the poem is too much a about an indivudual and to little about the collective to be a description of that politic system.

I took the liberty of quoting the poem, in case somebody wanted to read it for this discussion.
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
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:
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. -- Ted Hughes

[simon]

It seems to me that the hawk or person is taking it's creation and the creation of the things around it for granted. It looks at the sun and the winds only as an advantage to reach it's end. In the way of a person using all tools around them to gain power and prowess, whether it's air and sun to manipulate small prey of mice or speech and ideas to control a people, I can see this as a poem atbout control. Because the poet uses words such as, "top", "dream", "high", "upward", "kill", mine", and these are all words that show the personality of someone who is unforgiving. The line, "And the earth's face upward for my inspection" is indictive of how this creature believes all is for it's "advantage" and "convenience". The fact that it is the earths face that looks up to it for approval means that the largest form that sustains life would be subject to this persons control, something that in reality is a dream.

I don't see any types of communism in this though.

[emily655321]

"The allotment of death," and "No arguements assert my right:/The sun is behind me."

These lines stand out most strongly for me. It speaks of one who feels a kind of divine right to power. A serial killer, for instance, or political leader. *ahem* "No arguements" can sway their unreasonable opinion of themselves, neither do they feel they must argue in defense of their actions. In fact, the hawk feels that it would be an insult to his dignity to explain his point of view, because "the sun is behind" him; nature itself has imbued him with this right.