Hurt Hawks (Poem Summary)

Poem Summary

Lines: 1-2

The poem opens with the gruesome image of a bird’s injured wing, so badly damaged that the bone “jags from the clotted shoulder” like a “broken pillar.” This metaphor invites the reader to imagine something once solid, strong, and noble, now in ruin. The speaker follows this image with a description of the bird limping, dragging its wing “like a banner in defeat.” Using a simile to compare the injured bird to a soldier retreating with his army’s flag after defeat, Jeffers anthropomorphizes the hawk by projecting human qualities onto the animal.

Lines: 3-5

The lines “No more to use the sky forever but to live with famine / And pain ” sound like penal sentencing by a judge, and may remind us of the biblical account of Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden to a world of hunger and suffering. But despite its injury and confinement to the earth, the hawk will not be spared a long, drawn out death by another predator because the hawk’s talons make it dangerous prey. Ironically, though, the bird is now in the position of prey, rather than its usual role as hunter.

Lines: 6-8

The narrator projects human awareness onto the animal, perceiving it to be waiting for death, when in fact the hawk is simply preserving its life the best it knows how. The phrase “waits / The lame feet of salvation” indicates, importantly, that it is the feet of salvation — and not of the bird — that are lame. In the form of death, salvation is coming very slowly, like a lame, crippled person. And again, the bird is described like a person, as having the ability to dream, which it does until the dawn wakes it from its sleep.

Line: 9

The hawk, a creature that once graced the sky and feared few enemies, suffers more from this sad fate because the contrast with its former condition and abilities is so great.

Lines: 10-12

Curs are mongrel dogs. The term can also describe a surly or cowardly person, and this double meaning enables Jeffers to lash out at the vast majority of people who, in his opinion, oppose the very values and traits that the hawk symbolizes: integrity, courage, and defiance. Despite this torment, the hawk remains fearless (“intrepid”) and fierce, a quality that can be detected in his eyes, which are described as “terrible.” No common, earthly threat can harm the bird. Only death will “humble” such an awesome creature. In this context, death is considered a redeemer because it will free the bird’s strong, noble essence from the prison of its body.

Lines: 13-14

The “wild God of the world” likely refers to death. However, the narrator may be speaking about the biblical God in words that attempt to sum up His complex nature, which permits both beauty and ugliness, goodness and evil, to exist side by side in the world. In another interpretation, Jeffers could be distiguishing between the biblical God and “the wild God of the world,” nature. Regardless, because the hawk is arrogant, it will receive no mercy, no quick death, from the God of the poem. In most cases, arrogance is considered a flaw, but here the narrator considers it a sign of the hawk’s superiority and unwillingness to bend or submit.

Line: 15

In this line the narrator suddenly switches tone from that of a narrator, supplying description and commentary about a scene, to that of an accusor, addressing readers directly, passing judgment: “You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him.” “Communal” means living, working, and eating together, which on the surface does not seem to be harmful or incorrect behavior. Yet Jeffers’s personal philosophy holds that humankind has been its own worst enemy, promoting group thinking, suppression of individuality, loss of independence, and disregard for the earth. “Him” refers to the “wild God,” who may be the original Creator we have “forgotten” after centuries of building cities, gathering possessions, pursuing pleasure, and, ultimately, worshipping ourselves.

Lines: 16-17

After accusing the human race of having for gotten, the narrator tells us that the hawk remembers. The hawk is closer to the “wild God” because he shares the same nature, he is “intemperate and savage.” In line 17, we see clearly that the narrator considers wildness an admirable quality, on a par with beauty. In that same line, the narrator adds that dying men, like the hawk, remember the “wild God of the world.” Who are these men? They may be those who, through danger or sickness, come face-to-face with death and thereby confront their own mortality. On the other hand, they could be those special individuals who are noble like the hawk but are symbolically dying due to the un healthy, corrupt state of the societies and communities in which they live.

Lines: 18-19

Line 18 is often cited by Jeffers’s critics and fans alike as a slogan for his inhumanist philosophy. Upon the ending of stanza 1, the narrative voice shifts from the third person to the first person. Up to this point the speaker has described a scene in which he is not a participant. Now the narrator tells us explicitly what he thinks about humankind. He’d “sooner kill a man than a hawk” if he could do it without having to face the consequences, or “penalties.” But the narrator realizes for the first time that he may have to put the bird out of its “unable misery.”

Lines: 20-21

This seemingly simple comment, “We had fed him six weeks,” reveals an interesting insight into the dramatic situation of the poem: first, the speaker is not alone; second, he discovered the bird of the first stanza several weeks earlier. The hawk has been in his care for six or more weeks. But even after caring for it and releasing it back into the wild, the hawk limps back over the nearby hills “asking for death.” If the hawk cannot fly, it will never survive on its own in the wild, where it belongs. Furthermore, a hawk that relies on humans, as is indicated by its regular return in the evenings, will die on its own.

Lines: 22-24

Although the hawk returns “asking for death,” it does not do so “like a beggar.” Even now, the hawk demonstrates “arrogance.” The narrator kills it with a bullet, giving the bird “the lead gift in the twilight,” thus answering the hawk’s request of line 22. Compared to the amount of time the speaker took to introduce us to this wounded animal, the actual act of killing the bird is summarized briefly in one sentence. This line, which perhaps is the climax of the poem, sets up the final image of release.

Lines: 25-27

After the bird is shot, our attention divides into two directions: the “relaxed” body falls to the ground, but something else “soars.” Rather than depicting a bloody scene, Jeffers describes the hawk’s “owl-downy, soft feminine feathers.” If we read line 25 aloud we may notice how Jeffers seems to match the soft sounds of the words with the feathers they describe. Throughout the poem, the hawk is referred to as “he.” Yet here the narrator designates the feathers as feminine. The most likely explanation is that the narrator considers the body to have feminine characteristics, while the spirit is masculine.

After six weeks of incapacity and starvation, the hawk’s trapped spirit escapes as released energy, a force so strong that even in the distance “the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising.” But just as sudden as its release from a life of pain, the hawk’s spirit escaped from its physical container, “quite unsheathed from reality.” If the poem begins by setting up a scene of an injured, earthbound bird doomed to walk starving and tormented, the end of the poem suggests a return to the sky, a soaring that finally frees the bird from the cruel reality here on the ground.

Topics for Further Study

• Write a poem which anthropomorphizes a creature or object by giving it distinctly human qualities, much like the way Jeffers compares the hawk to man in the first stanza.
• For some, the thought of a poet living alone in a stone tower seems to perfectly fit the cliche of an artist as solitary figure. Do you feel artists — poets, painters, dancers, etc. — are, as a whole, more removed from society than others, or closer? Give examples to explore and develop your viewpoint.
• Would you “sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk?” Why or why not?