Hawk Roosting (Style)

Style

This poem has no strict pattern to its rhythm or its rhyme scheme, thus it is considered an open form poem. However, the poem does make use of structural devices and repetition in other ways to make its point.

The most obvious structural pattern in “Hawk Roosting” is that there are four lines to each stanza, or cluster of lines. The lengths of the lines within each stanza are different, so the number of words in each stanza varies. Nevertheless, there is a visual consistency as the eye skims down the page. This degree of order corresponds to the poem’s subject matter by giving the piece an overall design, just as the speaker of the poem implies in stanza 3 that Creation has an overall design. A poem with a more rigid structure — for example, uniform rhythm in each line, or a regular rhyme scheme — would contradict the hawk’s sense of being accountable to no one.

There are rhymes at the ends of the third and fourth lines in the first stanza and again in the first and third lines in the second. The fact that these are in the beginning of the poem, and that the poem never rhymes again, may indicate that the author intended his readers to think at first that this poem was more traditional in sentiment and structure than it really is in order to make the hawk’s coldness more shocking. Throughout the poem there are internal rhymes, or rhyming words placed near each other but not at the ends of lines, such as “flight” and “right” in stanza 5. Many of these rhymes use assonance, in which the vowel sounds of the two words are alike, even though the end sounds of the words are not. Some examples of these are “sleep” and “eat” in stanza 1; “ray” and “face” in stanza 2; “took” and “foot” in stanza 3; and “began” and “am” in stanza 6. Such repetition of sounds allows the author to give a musical quality to the poem without adopting a rigid structure.