Hurt Hawks (Style)

Style

There is a substantial body of criticism, though much of it obscure, on Jeffers’s versecraft. Some commentators believe that he employed free verse, while others disagree. In personal correspondence, Jeffers himself asserted that it is not really free verse, but fairly strict strong-stress metric. Here is a reasonable assessment of “Hurt Hawks”: the first part presents lines of 6 stresses and 4 stresses, in alteration; the second part is composed of lines of alternating lines of 7 stresses and 4 stresses. However, critics often disagree when attempting to judge versification.

Those who consider “Hurt Hawks” free verse maintain that Jeffers didn’t use a set rhyme pattern or traditional form of line length to construct this piece. Free doesn’t necessarily mean without form; rather, the poem’s shape grows organically from its content, not unlike the way a river carves its own banks. Jeffers believed poems should balance both “substance and sense, a physical and psychological reality.” Perhaps driven by this instinct, Jeffers divided the poem into two long stanzas, each identified by roman numerals. Stanza literally means “room” in Italian, and in this poem Jeffers carefully organizes his images in these two rooms: the first stanza establishes a dramatic situation upon which the second stanza acts.

Jeffers uses fairly long lines throughout the poem. These long lines seem to build a momentum of their own, the poet’s voice increasing in force as it stretches out across the page. Perhaps Jeffers uses these extended lines to mirror the speaker’s disappointed anger in seeing the dying animal; his emotions build as he details the gruesome scene. Even though his lines don’t follow a set rhythmic pattern of accented stresses, as in the sonnet, each line’s pace seems to match the content it carries. For instance, the poem opens with an injured hawk trailing its broken wing, the once graceful bird of prey limping along in awkward, stilted hops. If we read these first lines aloud and pay close attention to the natural stresses and accents of the words, Jeffer’s craft becomes apparent in the way the rhythm seems to mirror the bird’s limp: “The BROKen PILlar of the WING JAGS from the CLOTted SHOULDer, / The WING TRAILS like a BANner in deFEAT.” Jeffers uses similar tensions between content and form throughout the poem to give an otherwise “free verse” poem a solid and sustaining structure.