Hurt Hawks

Robinson Jeffers 1928

“Hurt Hawks,” published in 1928 in the collection Cawdor and Other Poems, is one of Robinson Jeffers most noted pieces. In it Jeffers presents life as composed of two primary forces: that which is strong, dynamic, and noble and that which is weak, passive, and tame. Evident, too, in “Hurt Hawks” is Jeffers’s overall disatisfaction with humankind, which he believed to be destroying itself through stupidity and selfishness. The line “I’d sooner kill a man than a hawk” has encountered much objection, but many readers are attracted to Jeffers’s underlying philosophy of “inhumanism,” which he defined as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence” — essentially the belief that humanity needs to rid itself of self-centeredness and egocentrism in order to appreciate the greatness of all creation and establish a healthy relationship with nature, the earth, and the animal kingdom.

“Hurt Hawks” recounts the narrator’s observation of an injured hawk, once powerful and thriving but now doomed to die by starvation. The narrator admires the hawk’s pride and determination, finding that humankind as a whole compares unfavorably with this uncompromising wild creature. After failing to nurse the bird back to health, the narrator finally shoots it in an act of mercy, releasing the hawk’s spirit from the prison of its broken body.