Today’s Poem: Hurt Hawks

Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember

John James Audubon, Red Tailed Hawk, 1829 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Hurt Hawks

by Robinson Jeffers

I
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him   
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him for six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
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What are we to say when we encounter the line “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk”? This was what struck the public ear when Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) published “Hurt Hawks” in his 1928 collection Cawdor and Other Poems — the memorable line, opening the second part of the poem, declaring that a fierce, alien view of the world was the deep, true way to see the human relation to nature.

It was also the line that, for some years, kept me from fuller appreciation of Jeffers. The poem is certainly widely known. Anthologies of American poetry typically choose “Hurt Hawks” as a selection from Jeffers, setting it beside “Shine, Perishing Republic” and (slightly less commonly) “Be Angry at the Sun.” But something in the poem’s most striking line always put my back up, seeming a cheap pose: tough-guy Nietzscheanism, as Nietzsche was understood in those days. “I’d sooner . . . kill a man than a hawk,” really? No sense of hesitation for the human? And that I’m-a-no-nonsense-man interpolation, “except the penalties”?

But in recent years, I’ve found myself coming back to Jeffers and the long rhythmic lines, often nine or ten stresses, that became his trademark. And that has meant facing up to “Hurt Hawks,” trying to understand the interaction of the poem’s two parts: seventeen and fifteen lines of uneven verse.

In the first part, Jeffers shows us a red-tail hawk with a shattered wing that trails the bird “like a banner in defeat.” Even were he to survive, the hawk will never again be able to fly — never again deploy the freedom of the sky and the deadly power of its talons. Death would be “salvation,” of a kind.

That picture leads the poem to a meditation on Nature and the “wild God of the world.” Like, say, Robert Frost in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” Jeffers rejects the pathetic fallacy, the ordinary human reading of human emotions into animals. But where Frost rejects all human projection, Jeffers suggests that extraordinary men — ah, Nietzsche! — or those in such extraordinary circumstances as “men that are dying” can perceive the god of nature that has been forgotten by “you communal people.” That god can sometimes be merciful to animals but “not often to the arrogant,” which in the context of the first part of the poem seems another sneer at the comfortable “communal people” so distant from the “beautiful and wild” — from the natural state to which they must return in the moments of their dying.

Robinson Jeffers at Tor House, c. 1925 (Wikimedia Commons)

The second part of “Hurt Hawks” opens with the poem’s most troubling line. But it does serve the purpose of emphasizing the poet’s unwillingness simply to kill the hawk. “We had fed him for six weeks,” the poem tells us, then “gave him freedom” — but it’s a strange, ersatz freedom, for the hawk cannot fly and is simply free to find its death from starvation. After the hawk wanders “the foreland hill,” it returns, “asking for death.” And the poet grants him “the lead gift in the twilight.”

You can catch something of this mood in D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake,” a poem from the same era, where Lawrence feels himself diminished by neither killing a snake at a water trough nor saluting it and letting it go, instead throwing “a clumsy log” at “the water-trough with a clatter” — the worst, least manly, of responses.

In “Hurt Hawks,” however, Jeffers — whose birthday was this weekend, January 10 — does kill the hawk. And we get a conclusion in which the hawk’s corpse relaxes into “owl-downy, soft feminine feathers,” while its fierce spirit soars — frightening the night-herons “at its rising / Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.”

Perhaps the most curious feature of all this, the element that ties the two parts together and makes a richer whole, comes when we think about the title again after reading the poem. “Hurt Hawks,” it’s called, but there is only one hawk. The only other figure in the poem is the poet, suggesting he himself is another hurt hawk. Nature is not often merciful to the arrogant, but when the hawk returns in the evening arrogantly asking for mercy, the antithesis of arrogance, the poet, the second hurt hawk, grants it.

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