Hughes voices the thoughts of a hawk roosting in a tree as it surveys its domain. The hawk sees itself as the rightful ruler of all it sees, taking what it wants through violence and strength. It feels no need to justify its actions, seeing itself as the pinnacle of nature. The hawk wishes to maintain the status quo indefinitely, keeping the world under its control and preventing any change to the order it has imposed.

1. Hawk Roosting
Ted Hughes

2. 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

3. 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

4. Specific Context
• Hughes writes about the elements and aspects of the natural world
in much of his poetry.
• Simon Armitage: for Hughes, poetry was ‘a connecting rod between
nature and humanity’.
• Hughes: (from Poetry in the Making)
– It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will
unlock the doors of all those many mansions in the head and express something
– perhaps not much, just something – of the crush of information that presses in
on us from the way a crow flies over…
• ‘Hawk Roosting’ was published in 1960 in Hughes’ second book,
Lupercal.
• The character of Hawk features in a number of poems in this
volume.
• It is one of many poems that he wrote about nature and the natural
world.

5. Theme and Meanings
• Hughes voices the thoughts of an apex predator, ‘nature
thinking’ (Hughes said).
• Hawk’s thoughts are strange, violent, alien to us.
• Hughes wishes to show us the natural world from an unusual
perspective.
• Conflict and violence are inevitable: all must feed, and Hawk
sees this as his entitlement. ‘No arguments assert’ his right:
he takes without argument.
• The poem literally explores Hawk’s mindset – but also lets us
metaphorically understand how predatory people see others.
• Hawk in some ways is a fascist. He has taken power by
violence and imagines that this is because of a Darwinian
entitlement to be in control.

6. Form and Structure
• Six four-line stanzas without regular rhyme.
• Lines vary between 6 and 9 syllables, so can be short
and punchy.
• Hughes voices the thoughts of Hawk as he surveys his
environment from his roost.
• There are no commas. Hawk does not pause. He is
direct, certain, clear.
• In the first two stanzas he talks of his location; the
second, of his power and importance; the last two assert
his desire to remain (as he sees it) in control of an
unchanging world.

7. Language
• Blunt and monosyllabic. Often violent.
• Egoistic: ‘I’ in every stanza, much about Hawk’s
viewpoint, image of the ‘sun being behind him’ both
literally and metaphorically.
• Some sophisticated vocabulary: falsifying, buoyancy,
sophistry, allotment – this suggests precision, an analytic
but rather alien mind.
• Reference to ‘Creation’ sounds abstract, philosophical.
• The vocabulary used is rather incongruous: these words
‘jar’ in the context in which they are used. Hawk is not
human, so he does not think as a human might.
• He is both intelligent and extremely violent, an unusual
combination.