Robinson Jeffers

 

Hurt Hawks

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 bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him 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.

~Robinson Jeffers

*I think the important thing here is to ask who it is who is speaking.  I feel that there is only one actual hawk here and that the plural in the title simply signifies kinship and connection.  If only men that are dying remember the wild God of the world, then the authorial voice must feel as though he is dying.  A man living with his family at most, cut off from a communal people, he recognizes a similar proud struggle against an inevitability in the hawk before him.  That he would sooner kill a man than a hawk maybe speaks to this estrangement from others being a conscious choice but if he is referring to himself with his mention of violence then there would still be penalties to give him pause, both of a spiritual and bluntly physical nature.  What does it mean for him that the hawk's passing merged in the dusk with the fierce crack of a gun?  What does it mean that he offered mercy to the redtail, first through pity and then with finality?  Is it simply age that makes him identify with the hawk's incapacity?  Night-herons are a communal species.  What does it mean that their river is flooded?

Thank you...

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-  
  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding  
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding  
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing  
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding  
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding  
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!  
  
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here  
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!  
  
  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion  
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,  
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

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How to bend our words to apprehend the movements of the world?  The bouncing, consonant stutter of the wind, the end rhyme of its rise and fall.  The abrupt rise in exclamation and suddenly smooth turn of wing upon the sky.  The intensely grateful waver of flame re-awakened by these gifts.

The heart held in despair or tedium, when given reason, leaps up with such sublime intensity that all the headwind in the world is nothing to its joyous grace.  Though not simply erased, the winds are taken up and transmuted into a part of that joy.  With something of a falcon's heart we come by the means to understand, accept, and embrace this inevitable turbulence, becoming nimble and light enough to float upon it unbowed.  The gift of this endlessly beautiful world.

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*grainy, grey day pictures are mine, .gif is not*