Hurt Hawks

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Hurt Hawks

Robinson Jeffers 1928

“Hurt Hawks,” published in 1928 in the collection Cawdor and Other Poems, is one of Robinson Jeffers most noted pieces. In it Jeffers presents life as composed of two primary forces: that which is strong, dynamic, and noble and that which is weak, passive, and tame. Evident, too, in “Hurt Hawks” is Jeffers’s overall disatisfaction with humankind, which he believed to be destroying itself through stupidity and selfishness. The line “I’d sooner … kill a man than a hawk” has encountered much objection, but many readers are attracted to Jeffers’s underlying philosophy of “inhumanism,” which he defined as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence”—essentially the belief that humanity needs to rid itself of self-centeredness and egocentrism in order to appreciate the greatness of all creation and establish a healthy relationship with nature, the earth, and the animal kingdom.

“Hurt Hawks” recounts the narrator’s observation of an injured hawk, once powerful and thriving but now doomed to die by starvation. The narrator admires the hawk’s pride and determination, finding that humankind as a whole compares unfavorably with this uncompromising wild creature. After failing to nurse the bird back to health, the narrator finally shoots it in an act of mercy, releasing the hawk’s spirit from the prison of its broken body.

Author Biography

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1887, Robinson Jeffers was the son of a professor of theology and thusly no stranger to the academic world. He began tutorials at the age of three and a half with his parents, studying biblical history and Greek mythology. By the age of twelve young Jeffers was well read in French, German, Latin, Greek, and English. The University of Western Pennsylvania accepted him for admission when he was fifteen, but his father’s failing health prompted the family to move to California. He remained there for the majority of his life, where he came to be known as a “Californian landscape painter,” due to his abundance of vivid nature poems. At his new university, Occidental, Jeffers edited the school’s literary magazine while taking classes in astronomy, ethics, geology, history, economics, biblical literature, and rhetoric. While later pursuing a graduate degree in literature at the University of Southern California, by then only eighteen years old, Jeffers fell in love with fellow student Una Call Kuster. At the time of their affair she was two years older and already married. Jeffers soon left the country to study philosophy in Switzerland, where he picked up what he would later term “inhumanism,” before returning to USC to study medicine for three years. Although he attempted to avoid Una and their affair by moving to Seattle, when he inherited almost $10,000 in 1912 and moved back to Southern California, they were soon reunited.

After marrying Una in 1913, upon her divorce from her first husband, and tragically losing their baby daughter, Jeffers and his wife moved to Carmel, California, where he built by hand a granite house complete with stone tower. With a clear view of the ocean and the mountains, Jeffers rarely left his isolated fortress, writing over nineteen volumes of poetry from within “Hawk Tower’s” stone walls. He used part of his inheritance to self publish his first volume, Flagons and Apples, that same year, which critics ignored; he later wished that he had instead destroyed the collection of “embarrassingly stilted love poems.” The southern California landscape, which he compared to the “magnificent unspoiled scenery” of Homer’s Ithaca, became his new passion and would dominate the majority of his work from 1914 on. Highly disturbed by two horrific world wars, Jeffers experienced what he later called “the accidental new birth” of his mind, which revealed to him the beginnings of his isolationist philosophy

of “Inhumanism.” His wife considered the act of building the stone tower the source of his new vision. “As he helped the masons shift and place the wind and water-worn granite,” she later noted, “I think he realized some kinship with it and became aware of strengths in himself unknown before.” Jeffers found a strange escape in stone imagery from the suffering in the world. He considered it inhuman but beautiful, permanent, and universal compared to our fleeting time in this world.

Jeffers and Una had twin sons while living in the stone house. Over the course of his career Jeffers drew the attention of many critics. Some rejected his work outright as pseudo-prophetic and bloated, while others praised him as the most original of visionary poets of this century. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including Poetry magazine’s Levinson, Eunice Tiethens Memorial and Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Prizes, The Borestone Mountain Poetry Award, and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. A prolific poet and playwright, self-declared philosopher and prophet, Robinson Jeffers died in 1962 in his sleep after four years of quickly degenerating health.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

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,

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?

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.

Themes

Flesh vs. Spirit

The speaker of the poem, used to living in a world of poverty and war, thinks of the bird as something spiritual, belonging to the air, now trapped in a physical world where broken wings and pain exists. The dramatic situation of the poem—a hawk fallen from the air, condemned to limp on the ground and “live with famine”—may suggest a transition from the freedom of the spirit world to the weakness and morality of the flesh. Now the bird can only imagine flying, his dream disrupted each morning by the harsh reality of dawn. Despite his appreciation and respect for the animal, the narrator realizes that he must do the right thing, that is, release the hawk from its misery and dependence on humans. After giving the bird death in the form of a bullet, or “lead gift,” the narrator sees the spirit “unsheathed” from the flesh, soaring in a “fierce rush,” leaving the physical remains behind.

God and Religion

“Hurt Hawks” employs much language with religious connotations. Some examples include “salvation,” “redeemer,” “God,” “mercy,” and “unsheathed from reality.” The narrator also implies that the hawk’s spirit rises from the corpse after death. Furthermore, the injured bird is said to stand under the “oak-bush” waiting for salvation, an image that might remind some readers of Jesus Christ on the cross on Calvary. Jeffers, whose father was a theology professor, possessed considerable knowledge of Christianity and Roman mythology, which he drew upon for his poetic images. However, Jeffers used religious themes for his own purposes, in unusual ways. The narrator’s commentary in “Hurt Hawks” appears to support the ideas of religious primitivism and pantheism. Primitivism cherishes the simple life close to nature. Pantheism, which can be viewed as complementary to primitivism, equates God with the forces and laws of the universe. Considering this, we understand how Jeffers might refer to death or nature as the “wild God of the world,” or how he can claim to value the life of a hawk over that of a human being. These beliefs are consistent with his philosophy of inhumanism.

Nature and Its Meaning

Jeffers wrote so often and so vividly about the natural world he became known as a “California landscape painter.” In “Hurt Hawks” Jeffers uses observations of an injured bird to explore larger questions about nature. Note that nature dominates the poem, with no intrusions of buildings, cars, or humans, other than the narrator. The inhabitants of this world are birds of prey, cats, coyotes, curs, game, and herons. Of paramount importance in this realm are the primal physical sensations of pain, misery, famine, and torment. It is to this primitive world that the hawk belongs, a world where wildness and savagery are required for survival, and where death is the “wild God.” Humans have protected themselves from nature by becoming “communal.” In doing so, they have lost self-sufficiency, awareness of mortality, and appreciation for nature. The narrator knows that if he continues feeding the hawk, enabling it to live as long as it is in his care, he is doing it no favor. The hawk is a wild animal that must live in nature or die. Unlike humans, it cannot compromise its essence.

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.

Historical Context

Jeffers was born in 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was tutored by his father, a Presbyterian preacher and theologian, in various languages, the classics, and the Bible before being sent to boarding schools in Switzerland and Germany. Following his graduation in 1905 from Occidental College in Highland Park, California, at the age of 17, Jeffers earned a master’s degree in literature from the University of Southern California; he later spent several years studying medicine at USC and forestry at the University of Washington. A modest inheritance enabled Jeffers and his wife to settle on an isolated plot of coastal land in Carmel, California, where he built a stone house and tower overlooking the Pacific Ocean and devoted himself to his art.

The 1920s, the decade in which Jeffers wrote “Hurt Hawks,” was a period of exploration and vision. Many noted “lost generation” writers like Ernest Hemingway traveled the world in search of purpose and inspiration. During this decade Charles Lindbergh also completed the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight, Albert Hegenberger made the first successful flight from San Francisco to Hawaii, and Amelia Earhart scouted her first transatlantic flight as a passenger with two other pilots. Contrary to this national fever for travel and exploration, Jeffers instead chose move his family to Southern California, build a granite house by hand, and live isolated on a remote rocky shore. Jeffers spent the rest of his life there composing books and philosophical essays until his death in 1962. Poems such as “Hurt Hawks” exemplify Jeffers’s antisocial convictions and a deeper trust in the natural world than in the booming economy and populace of the United States. While across the country, Wonder Bread was making its debut and “He’s got the Whole World in his Hands” was the nation’s favorite song, Jeffers sat in his stone tower and accused society of small-mindedness, using religion as a dying convenience, and living in artificial and unsustainable cities of concrete and steel. While the nation experienced sweeping changes and transition between postwar prosperity and the

Compare & Contrast

1928: Transatlantic telephone service begins between London and New York, costing $25 per minute and restricted to 3 minutes total duration.
Today: The internet, or World Wide Web, provides nearly instant communication and distribution of information over an international network of telephone lines and satellites. Service providers charge private individuals around $15 per month for unlimited access through their personal computers.
1928: Television technology debuts in the auditorium of New York’s Bell Telephone Labs. In a demonstration that is more like a video conference than television as we know it today, this first demonstration enabled audience members to watch Herbert Hoover address them from Washington, D.C., while his hearing his voice over telephone wires.
Today: Businesses, universities, and classrooms widely use integrated video conferencing systems for distance learning, employee training, and political debates.
1928: Police arrest more than 75,000 people for drinking alcohol, which is outlawed during the Prohibition Era. Some 1,565 Americans die from drinking toxic homemade liquor, hundreds are blinded, and many are killed in bootlegger wars.
Today: Alcohol companies advertise widely on television, radio, and in the print media, convincing the nation that any cause for celebration is “Miller Time.” Multimillion-dollar promotional campaigns closely link alcohol with professional sports and America’s youth. Over 100,000 Americans die each year of alcohol poisoning alone; countless others are injured or killed in alcohol-related auto accidents and domestic violence arising from alcoholism.

coming Depression of 1929, Jeffers, angry and eccentric, averred that he’d “rather, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.”

Critical Overview

It is difficult to find much specific criticism of “Hurt Hawks” and his other early, shorter poems. Overshadowing this poem is the larger criticism of Jeffers as a philosophical poet and writer of long, narrative pieces. Many critics begin their discussion of Jeffers’s nature poetry with a synopsis of his fairly obscure personal philosophy. “Inhumanism,” as Jeffers called it, “is a shifting of emphasis from man to not-man. It offers reasonable detachment as the rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy.” This is a repugnant idea to many, including several critics who find Jeffers’s work occasionally contradictory or irrelevant. Kenneth Rexroth, in his book Assays, judged Jeffers’s philosophy “a mass of high-flown statements indulged in for their melodrama alone, and often essentially meaningless.” Robert Boyers, in the Sewanee Review, similarly observed of his poems, “Structurally, they are sound enough, but the texture of these poems is swollen by effusions of philosophizing and by attempts to impose representative signification on characters and actions.” This may apply to the lengths to which the speaker of “Hurt Hawks” goes to impose religious symbolism on the dying bird.

Other critics view Jeffers and his “philosophic-dramatic” poetry as a revolutionary and prophetic work worthy of high praise. In his book The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, Joseph Warren Beach points out that in “Hurt Hawks” and other shorter poems Jeffers “celebrates with greatest unction is the peace that lies in the grave. So great are the sufferings and weariness of men, and indeed of all animated beings, that their profoundest longing is for death.” James Dickey praises Jeffers in Babel to Byzantium, observing that he “fills a position in this country that would simply have been an empty gap without him: that of the pet as prophet, as large-scale philosopher, as doctrine-giver.” Perhaps the greatest praise comes from Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, quoted in the Los Angeles Times declaring Jeffers “undoubtedly … one of the great poets of this century.”

Criticism

David Rothman

David J. Rothman is a poet, critic, and journalist who has published widely and taught English at many colleges and secondary schools. He recently became the Executive Director of the Robinson Jeffers Association, a group of scholars and writers. In the following essay, Rothman describes how Jeffers portrays the “stark beauty and violence of inhuman nature” in “Hurt Hawks,” which he considers among the poet’s best work.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was one of the most famous American poets of the twentieth century, and he led a career that ranks as one of the most fascinating, productive, and controversial among all American artists. In 1925, already in his late 30s, Jeffers was relatively undistinguished as the author of two virtually unknown volumes of verse; these would prove to be very different than his mature work. But with the publication of Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems in 1925, he rocketed to a fame shared by only a handful of contemporary writers. In the following twelve years, his output was tremendous: seven lengthy volumes of new poetry, each of which contained one or more long, tragic, narrative poems along with visionary lyrics about nature and the fate of civilization. Several of the books also included verse plays, often based on free adaptations of Greek tragedies. Many of these volumes were highly praised best-sellers, and some are still in print. In 1932, with the publication of Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems, his photograph, a portrait by Edward Weston, appeared on the cover of Time. The anonymous reviewer referred to Jeffers as a writer “whom a considerable public now considers the most impressive poet the U. S. has yet produced.”

After this high point, Jeffers’s star sank rapidly beginning in the mid-1930s. The causes included his continuing emphasis on what was viewed as social detachment, in a time when more and more writers were calling for politically engaged art; his

What Do I Read Next?

Many critics trace Jeffers’s theories of inhumanism back to his years of philosophical studies in Zurich. While at the university he read Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, two philosophers whose works shed interesting light on Jeffers’s later poems. Schopenhauer is the primary expounder of pessimism, the doctrine that reality is essentially evil. Nietzsche denounced religion and glorified a class of people who are superior to the vast masses of humanity.
Jeffers’s complete body of poetry, titled The Collected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, is gathered in two 300-page volumes, edited by Tim Hurt.
David Brower recently rereleased a book of poems and photographs originally published in 1965 by the Sierra Club. Not Man Apart: Photographs of the Big Sur Coast combines Jeffers’s poems with photos by several famous artists, including Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.
You can read the Jeffers’s once-censored poetry in the book In this Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers.

occasionally bitter philosophy of “Inhumanism,” in which Jeffers argued that human beings should turn away from human problems to contemplate the more lasting beauty and significance of the inhuman, natural world; his advocacy of isolationism during World War II, including poems highly critical of both Hitler and the Allies; and the harsh judgment by many critics that his poems lacked erudition, complexity, and craft, and were hysterical, by which the critics meant excessively violent and shrill. Although Jeffers published more work of high quality, and his free adaptation of Euripides’s Medea enjoyed a highly successful run on Broadway in the late 1940s, by the time of his death in 1962 he had been all but forgotten by scholars

“‘Hurt Hawks’ is an excellent introduction to all that is best in jeffers: gripping narrative; clear philosophical meditation; spiritual intensity; a tragic view of life; and a sublime vision of nature.”

and critics. He has, however, always retained a popular following, especially as a poet of the natural world.

Today Jeffers is primarily known through a few anthologized lyrics and some of the shorter narratives (such as “Roan Stallion”). Yet despite general critical indifference and lingering scholarly hostility, he has directly influenced not only poets such as William Everson (who credited his exposure to Jeffers’s work as one of the most important events of his life) and, more recently, Mark Jarman, but also figures as different as O’Neill and Faulkner. The list of recent and contemporary writers who claim to admire him includes Charles Bukowski, Robert Bly, Diane Wakoski, Edward Abbey, Dana Gioia, John Haines, Czeslaw Milosz, Gary Snyder, and many others. As Gioia has pointed out, Jeffers remains the greatest poet to date of the American West; one of the greatest American poets of the natural world, indeed one of the greatest visionary poets of the natural sublime ever to have written, and a crucial influence on the entire modern environmental movement; and one of the greatest narrative poets America has produced. I would add that he is one of the greatest verse dramatists this country has ever seen, perhaps surpassed only by T. S. Eliot. Most important, he conveys his vision of the poet’s place in the world so powerfully that even many who do not agree with him feel compelled to address his art and its claims.

“Hurt Hawks” embodies much of what is best in Jeffers’s work. First published in the volume Cawdor and Other Poems in 1928, Jeffers wrote it when he had recently become famous. It serves as a compact and forceful embodiment of what is most compelling in his work. Although the poem is short, it is clearly both a philosophical meditation and a narrative, which Jeffers presents in two numbered chapters, as if it were a microcosm of his longer poems. “Hurt Hawks” is also obviously a nature lyric, and the descriptions are highly evocative of the harshness and beauty of the inhuman world. The brief story about how the speaker, whom Jeffers presents as himself, tends for a wounded hawk and then kills it out of mercy because it can no longer “use the sky forever” is violent, and Jeffers does not soften that violence in any way. If anything, he uses the stark beauty and violence of in human nature as the setting for a story that provokes us into thinking about immense and dangerous questions, including nothing less than the relation of any given spirit—a man’s or a hawk’s, or by extension, any living thing—to the rest of the universe. The poem has a clear, direct, visionary quality that is very much in the spirit of tragic intensity and the sublime, or inexpressible and terrifying. This is the quality that has attracted so many readers to Jeffers’s work. So “Hurt Hawks” is an excellent introduction to all that is best in Jeffers: gripping narrative; clear philosophical meditation; spiritual intensity; a tragic view of life; and a sublime vision of nature.

The first part of the poem is in the present tense, although it implies a story. A hawk has somehow broken its wing, and thus will inevitably die if left in the wild. Interestingly, much of the vivid metaphorical language Jeffers initially chooses to portray this wild thing comes from the world of human civilization: the exposed bone of the injured wing is a “broken pillar” sticking out of the hawk’s body, a compound fracture; the unsupported wing “trails like a banner in defeat.” So the hawk is immediately compared to a stone ruin, and then to a defeated army.

Astonishingly, most critics have downplayed Jeffers’s interest in poetic language, as he did not dwell upon it in his writing about poetry, and his meanings appear at first to be fairly straightforward. In the case of “Hurt Hawks,” Jeffers makes a comparison between an injured animal and the kinds of defeats suffered by human beings, and the language is certainly more direct than that of high Modernists such as Pound and Eliot. Still, Jeffers’s metaphors are highly complex. In order to understand that complexity, we need to have a somewhat better sense of what Jeffers meant by “Inhumanism,” the name he gave to what he called his “philosophical attitude.” In a poem penned a few years before “Hurt Hawks” called “Credo,” Jeffers had written that “The beauty of things was born before the eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty / Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.” In other words, as he repeated throughout his life, the beauty of nature—in ocean, rock, hawk, sky, and star—has absolutely no need of human beings. In one of his longer poems, the narrative poem “Roan Stallion,” he actually called humanity “the last, least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution” of the universe.

In Jeffers’s view, many of civilization’s problems, including the problems that led during his lifetime to two devastating world wars, grew out of a childish insistence of considering ourselves to be the center of the universe and always looking inward when we should be looking outward, away from human concerns and toward the wild beauty of all creation. So Jeffers defined Inhumanism as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not–man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.” Hostile critics often called this attitude hateful and misanthropic, but it is probably more appropriate to say that Jeffers felt we should not exaggerate our own importance in the cosmic scheme of things. In Jeffers’s view, as he wrote in a poem called “The Answer”:

… the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.

This is the approach to life, deeply influenced by modern science as well as traditional Christianity, that has led many to see Jeffers as one of the spiritual founders of the modern environmental movement.

Why, then, if he always seeks to look away from humanity to let nature take its magnificent, indifferent course, does Jeffers begin “Hurt Hawks” with metaphors of ruined buildings and defeated banners, which are exclusively manmade things? Why does he compare “the great redtail” to things from the human world? Perhaps Jeffers’s language is more complex than it at first appears. By describing the hawk in this way, Jeffers acknowledges our human interest in it, and tries to relate it to our human experience, which is mostly so different from the hawk’s. For the hawk is “intemperate and savage,” unlike most of us, who are merely “communal people.” The poem, which is itself a manmade thing in praise of wild, inhuman nature, becomes a place where the human and the inhuman meet. This is true not only because the

“Jeffers argued that human beings should turn away from human problems to contemplate the more lasting beauty and significance of the inhuman, natural world”

human speaker confronts the hawk, but it is true even at the level of the poem’s most powerful metaphors, which mix the human and the inhuman, the hawk and the pillar. This observation helps to explain why the poem is called “Hurt Hawks,” when there appears to be only one hawk in it—perhaps the other hawk is the poet himself, and by extension that part in all of us that can somehow understand the “beautiful and wild” world of nature, even though we are human.

As the first part of the poem continues, the speaker dispassionately describes how the hawk will die, must die, because it is far too wounded to fly again, and therefore cannot hunt. The hawk will slowly starve, though it will do what it can to survive, driving away cats, “curs,” and coyotes, which will go in search of easier prey, “game without talons.” The speaker even imagines the hawk “flies in a dream,” although “the dawns ruin it.” But wait—once again, isn’t Jeffers assuming that hawks are actually similar to people? For we have no first-hand accounts of hawk dreams, since hawks cannot tell us about them. For that matter, it is hard to imagine how a hawk might wait for “the lame feet of salvation,” an explicitly Christian concept. If we are honest, it is hard to say what the hawk is waiting for, or even if he is waiting in any sense we can truly understand. All we have is our own, human language, which Jeffers cunningly sculpts to evoke something utterly beyond itself: the internal life of an injured raptor. The poet is self-consciously trying to get us to imagine something that cannot really be imagined.

Jeffers is quite aware of what he is doing, that his poem is not a scientific description of a wounded animal’s death, but a way of provoking us into meditation. At the end of the first part, the poet suddenly turns to his readers to accuse us of not even being able to think in such a way as to understand his story. Jeffers says we cannot possibly know or remember “the wild God of the world,” the God who will never be merciful to the arrogant hawk, who is somewhat like the stubborn king of a Greek tragedy. This is where the purpose of the poem becomes more clear. It is a kind of sermon, containing a parable that Jeffers uses to provoke us into thinking about the inhuman natural world. We are not hawks, and can never be like them (except perhaps for “men that are dying”); but somehow, through language, we can imagine what it might be like to be in the world the way that the hawk is in the world. We can contemplate the raw, arrogant, utterly wild, extravagant nature of this animal. And if we do so, we find that it is both terrifying and inexpressibly beautiful: sublime. And, for Jeffers, this act of imagining brings us closer to God, who is best described as himself “wild.” In Jeffers’s scheme it is “death” which is “the redeemer,” not Christ.

The second part of “Hurt Hawks” opens in a very different way than the first, and it is immediately more conversational: “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk,” a line that Edward Abbey modifies and quotes (without attributing it to Jeffers) in Desert Solitaire. Jeffers appears to be taking a hard line here, but he identifies himself as the “I,” hardly sounding like the enraged preacher of the first part who accuses us of being ignorant, communal people. It is as if Jeffers, after his blast of prophetic fire in the first stanza, is calmer now, speaking more personally and directly to us—with even a bit of dark humor. Notice that Jeffers is not announcing that he is going to go out and kill a man; he only says that he thinks men are probably more deserving of being killed than hawks, who only do what their natures require them to. The passage resonates with Whitman’s famous lines from Leaves of Grass:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are
        so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for
      their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to
      God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with
      the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that
      lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole
      earth.

Both poets admire the simultaneous stoicism (“they do not sweat and whine”) and freedom (“Not one kneels to another”) of wild animals. Jeffers’s statement may seem the more shocking, but his acknowledgment of “the penalties” for killing a man suggest that in this part of the poem he is less angry and prophetic and more like one of the communal people who lives by law. In this part of the poem, he is one of the accused, not just the accuser.

The rest of the poem bears out his resignation to and even the spiritual rewards of this destiny. Most of the passage describes, in chronological sequence, how Jeffers tried to nurse an injured redtail hawk—presumably the hawk of the first part—back to health. In the end, however, it becomes clear that the hawk will never fly again and can only look forward to “unable misery.” Jeffers releases it to die on its own, but it returns after a day, “asking for death.” Once again, it is irresistible to ask, in what sense does a redtail hawk ask for something like this? In what sense does a bird “ask” at all? Isn’t that something that implies language, which the wild, savage hawk does not have, at least in any sense that we can directly understand? Further, Jeffers goes on to say that the hawk is “not like a beggar,” again a human comparison. But now it is Jeffers who acts, shooting the hawk in a twilight mercy killing. He describes this killing not only as an ending, but as a liberation for something in the bird, a “what” that fiercely and magnificently soars and disperses.

Jeffers is extremely careful in this ending. He never refers to what happens as the release of a spirit or a soul. In fact, he says that the bird’s “rising” occurs “Before it was quite unsheathed from reality” [my emphasis]. In the end, what the bird was simply vanishes, but even in that vanishing there is astonishing poetic and spiritual force. And Jeffers sugar-coats nothing. The release of this spirit is violent and terrifying: “the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising.”

The final question to ask is why a man who upbraids his audience for being weak and communal spends any time nursing a wounded hawk? Why not simply let nature take its course? The answer is that Jeffers is far from being a one-dimensional character. “Hurt Hawks” is a poem filled with conflict and pain transformed into fierce beauty. The pain lies in Jeffers’s forthright acknowledgment of death, that even nature’s most beautiful, wild, and free animals, hawks, must die, and often die horribly. Jeffers doesn’t like this anymore than anyone else, and in the poem actually goes out of his way to try to save the hawk. But when he realizes it cannot live any kind of life that would be appropriate for a wild animal, he accepts what amounts to an ethical burden in relation to it. Of course, the killing of the hawk therefore remains an inevitably human act, an act of mercy, unlike anything a hawk would ever do. This contradiction only looks like a problem if we think Jeffers was unaware of it. In fact, it is the contradiction out of which he created the poem.

The tortured, but compelling and beautiful result is that Jeffers describes a connection between the living and the inanimate world, even between the living and something so vast that it includes both reality and that which is “unsheathed from reality.” Rather obviously, death will ultimately be our fate as well as the hawk’s, which is why Jeffers says that “men who are dying” also remember “the wild God of the world.” For Jeffers, the hurt hawk—arrogant, wild, and savage—opens a visionary passage to the infinite and eternal, in comparison to which our lives are insignificant. In awakening us to this sublime comparison, Jeffers evokes profound awe at the very fact of existence, connecting our humanity back to that wild God. If we read carefully, he forces us to stop, look around, and view life with astonishment at its vastness, fierceness, and energy.

It is Jeffers’s ability to convey awe, often through terror and uncompromising fierceness, that will make his poetry survive. His strongest work always aims to achieve pathos, the awakening of powerful feelings through the depiction of suffering. Despite his apparent quirkiness and isolation, and his radical differences with the Modernists, poems such as “Hurt Hawks” stand in a great American tradition in which a lonely mind confronts wilderness and through it senses the divine. As much as any poet in this tradition, Jeffers sought to bridge the gap between ordinary human life and a sense of the sacred. Far from denying his humanity, in his best work Jeffers thoroughly acknowledges it and then goes about the great task of giving it meaning by envisioning our place in the largest possible scheme of things, which includes even that dimension into which we will eventually be “unsheathed from reality.” Many readers have therefore described Jeffers’s project as a religious one, but we should remember that he worked exclusively as an artist, not a minister or theologian. While acknowledging that Jeffers’s poems draw on what he called “the religious instinct,” we might in the end do better to say that what he sought was not religious knowledge, enlightenment, or ecstasy or even a path to any dogmatical grace (death is the only redeemer). Instead, he sought simply to be utterly, completely, and even painfully awake.

Source: David Rothman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

Virginia E. Jorgensen

In the following excerpt, Jorgensen provides suggestions for teaching “Hurt Hawks.”

“Hurt Hawks,” an old favorite for many of us familiar with the wild beauty of the Point Lobos region, has not lost its impact with the years. Far from fading, this poem has increasing implications and attractions for today’s students. But the emotional pitch, the splendid drama in the everyday world of the hawk, may tempt us to find meanings that are not in the poem at all. The very intricacy of the treatment of a seemingly simple subject offers the chance to go ridiculously far afield. This is not, for example, a poem concerned with the question of euthanasia. The hawk is not a symbol of humanity. This is a poem about an injured hawk, a predatory, swift-flying, majestic, terrible bird that Jeffers found an affinity for.

For younger high school students, the kind of compassion Jeffers expresses here is close to their own poignant experiences with dying frogs, wild rabbits, or birds. But if this were merely a nature poem, the sad account of the death of a wild bird that failed to be healed and domesticated, there would be little to discuss with more able older, students. The problem is often, instead, that there seems to be too much, rather than too little, to be considered. First, however, a reading by the teacher is necessary. By tone of voice, by careful attention to the long stately lines and their meaningful punctuation, by emphasis of the climax, the teacher’s reading should awaken an interest in the dramatic power of the poem. After briefly considering the surface story, we must then begin to ask what the poem is really about.

Because Jeffers brings himself and his experience into the poem, we must be concerned with his purposes. In “Hurt Hawks,” the poet comments on nature, man, his God, and immortality. We might begin by asking the class, “What shocks you most about the poem?” Very likely it may be the line, “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” Is this statement merely the anguished, angry cry of the poet, or does it imply deeper meanings? If Jeffers values hawks more than man, does it follow that he necessarily hates man? It may be

“…Jeffers had a desire to see absolute, inextinguishable values in the world. But since he did not find these values in man, …Jeffers turned to the indomitable hawk as a symbol of the immortality of spirit.”

that Jeffers, who loved all wild nature, feels man is less significant than birds, or a less effective part of the universe. If this viewpoint seems joltingly unorthodox, we might stop to consider “The wild God of the world … Intemperate and savage” remembered equally well by hawks and dying men. Why does this primitive god fail to alleviate the suffering of both the predatory bird and mankind? A little later, in sharp contrast, the hawk’s body relaxes in death, but its spirit magically takes flight. How can we explain this sudden, dramatic picture of immortality?

To guide a discussion intelligently, particularly when it seems appropriate with older students familiar with English or world literature, the teacher should recognize the way “Hurt Hawks” fuses Jeffers’ inheritance from Shelley’s Platonism and from Greek tragedy. What are the implications of these influences on the poem? Having cast an awful judgment on the hawk, the primitive god mercilessly awaits the hawk’s death. Why is it important that the hawk, an Oedipus-like creature, should cling to his “implacable arrogance” (mentioned twice for emphasis) if we are to comprehend his suffering? This terrible retribution is rather quietly interrupted by the poet’s killing the bird. The hawk’s spirit, then, defying the classical realism of its suffering, speeds upward to become immortal in the serene order of the universe. Like Shelley, Jeffers had a desire to see absolute, inextinguishable values in the world. But since he did not find these values in man, particularly man riddled by the Freudian doubts of his own age, Jeffers turned to the indomitable hawk as a symbol of the immortality of spirit. Thus it is the spirit of the hawk, not man, that concerns Jeffers.

After we have discussed some of the underlying ideas in “Hurt Hawks,” we may invite students to read aloud the poem again, or perhaps read it silently. Let us notice the structure, probably an unconscious reflection of the Greek method. The action begins in medias res, the hawk’s wing long since broken, its life to be lived but a few more days. Why is it appropriate to begin with the slow, steady building of the pain, and excruciating pain heightened by words like “broken pillar,” “jags,” and “clotted”? Why is it effective that the hawk is not named until the pronoun without antecedent, “He,” in line 6 introduces the majestic, half-dying bird, living halfway between dream and reality? Throughout the stately description of the silent hawk, the pain intensifies, not for physical reason alone, but because “to the strong, incapacity is worse.” Although the primitive god will become increasingly “intemperate” in inflicting pain, there is a foreshadowing in “death the redeemer.” It is interesting, also, to note the dramatic progress from “lame feet of salvation,” the figure appropriately reflecting the bird’s previous hopeless condition in line 7, to this foreshadowing in line 11.

After the stage is set (the results of the injury, the building of the bird’s character and his dilemma) the poem abruptly shifts to a personal, familiar tone. The poet emerges to give us his viewpoint of the bird’s pain, elliptically expressed as “unable misery.” He tells us, almost matter-of-factly, what has happened, repeating a description of the broken wing, using even more clinical precision than in the first stanza. The pitiful wing “that trailed under his talons when he moved” reflects the poet’s comprehension of the bird’s fate: the beauty of the hawk—that is, his power for flight and independence—is ruined. The wing is now only an impediment to his talons (the symbol of only his material needs). Because the poet feels the experience intensely, we can appreciate the quiet control of the words “lead gift” which, in a casual reading, might seem a sugary euphemism.

The poem has begun, then, with measured pace, leading us with deadly inevitability to a final catharsis. After the informality of the first five lines of the third stanza, the chanting tones begin again. If there is a constriction in the tone and feeling of the first part of the poem, there is a balancing in the romantic rush of words that implies the spirit’s flight in the ending. There is the awful paradox of the soft, downy, dead creature, and the electrifying fierceness of the hawk’s spirit (“its” like “He” once again with no antecedent). The night-herons, like a Greek chorus, reflect the poet’s intense awe, his certainty of the immortality of all wild and beautiful things. At this point, another reading of the poem is in order.

Students who like to follow the building of dramatic unity may also be interested in the contribution of the sound to the sense. I should not take long to point out the binding effect of initial sound in “Hurt Hawks”: “cat nor coyote,” “week, waiting, without,” and “freedom flies.” The sentences are long and sweeping, so continuous that Jeffers uses a comma rather than the usual period in lines 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 11, and 21. In contrast to this continuity is the underlying rhythm, a rhythm as halting and uncertain as the hawk’s steps. The lines seem to limp alternately between an underlying seven-and five-foot line. “He stands under the oak-bush and waits” uses the majestic spondee to slow the pace. The rugged sounds of the words in the first part of the poem dissolve into the lyric beauty of those in the last six lines, surely some of the loveliest in all modern poetry.

A short study of “Hurt Hawks” should never try to encompass all a teacher knows (or thinks he knows!) about a poem or a poet. It should follow the interest and the abilities of the class. Let us hope there will be puzzled student to ask their own questions: why “Hurt Hawks” when the poem is about only one hawk? To whom do the phrases “Intemperate and savage” and “Beautiful and wild” refer, the hawk or the wild God? What does the word “forever” really imply in line 3? But whatever questions may arise, and no matter how much the class may digress, a final reading aloud must unify the class’s concepts of the poem.

The intellectually curious student may also enjoy drawing parallels with various lyrics of Shelley. He would surely profit by reading Jeffers’ poem “Self-Criticism in February,” which seems to sum up Jeffers’ basic philosophy. Prose selection that are particularly relevant for discussion are Wallace Stegner’s “The Colt,” published separately from the novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain as a short story, and, for older students, the essay “The Bird and the Machine” [in his The Woman on the Wall] by the anthropologist Loren Eiseley. This last selection is almost a prose counterpart of “Hurt Hawks” in its description of the freeing of captive hawks. Eiseley’s statement, “Sometimes of late years I find myself thinking the most beautiful sight in the world might be the birds taking over New York after the last man has run away to the hills,” was written in 1955, thirty years after Jeffers’ poem. The ideas in “Hurt Hawks,” then, seem to be gathering momentum.

Some of the grandeur of the wild country and wild creatures Jeffers loved seems to linger for us in this poem. The imprint of a major American poet is evident in the personal feelings expressed here so deftly. But the real value of a study of this poem would seem to be in an appreciation of the Romantic spirit that rushes on even in these unlikely times, in a tempering of the ear to hear the nightherons.

Source: “Hearing the Night-Herons: A Lesson on Jeffers’ ‘Hurt Hawks’” in English Journal, Vol. LI, No, 6, September 1962, pp. 440-42.

Sources

Abbey, Edward, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, New York: Simon and Schuster, [1968] 1990.

Beach, Joseph Warren, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth Century English Poetry, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1936.

Boyers, Robert, “A Sovereign Voice: The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. VII, No. 3, Summer, 1969.

Dickey, James, Babel to Byzantium, Farrar, Straus, 1968.

Everson, William (Brother Antoninus), The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.

_____, Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury, Berkeley: Oyez Press, 1968.

Gioia, Dana, “Strong Counsel,” Can Poetry Matter? Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1992, pp. 47-60.

“Harrowed Marrow,” Time, April 4, 1932, pp. 63-64.

Hass. Robert, introduction to Rock and Hawk: A Selection of the Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers, edited by Robert Hass, New York: Random House, 1987, pp. xv-xliii.

Jarman, Mark, Iris, Brownsville, OR: Storyline Press, 1992.

Jeffers, Robinson, The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Karman, James, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California, revised edition, Brownsville, OR: Storyline Press, 1995.

Rexroth, Kenneth. Assays, New Directions. 1961.

Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley, New York: New York University Press, 1965.

For Further Study

Brophy, Robert, Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual, and Symbol in His Narrative Poems, Shoe String Press, 1976.

Brophy traces connections between Jeffers’s deep understanding of Greek mythology and Christianity and the symbols which reoccur in his narrative poems.

Coffin, Arthur, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism, University of Wisconsin Press, 1971.