Hawk Roosting

Working on your own, or in a group, consider how relevant the following contextual points relating to Ted Hughes’s poem, Hawk Roosting are (i.e. how much knowledge of these facts would add to a reader’s appreciation of the poem.)

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

Drag the statements

Drag the statements in the list below so that they are ranked from most to least important.

Very important
Not important at all
  • Born in Yorkshire, in 1930.
  • Spent a lot of time in Devon and Yorkshire countryside - moorland where hawks are often to be found.
  • Fascinated by animals - a lot of his poems are about nature/wildlife.
  • His teachers in Mexborough Grammar School were very influential in his becoming a poet.
  • Met his first wife, the poet, Sylvia Plath, in university at Cambridge, and they married after a few months.
  • Enjoyed country pursuits (hunting, fishing, swimming outdoors) all his life.
  • Hawks have long been associated with hunting and used as symbols (eg the word “hawkish.”)
  • Was Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.
  • Although Hughes said that Hawk Roosting was simply about a hawk, and nature thinking, it can be appreciated on two levels - the cruelty of nature, but also can relate to the world, and the thoughts of a person with power, whether a bully in school, or a political leader.
  • Hawk Roosting is from his second volume of poetry, called Lupercal, published in 1960.

Questions

Remember: in an exam, in particular, you don't have time to include everything you know. You need to select what’s most important. Below are the points you gave the highest score to.

Top ranked points