Hawk Roosting- By Ted Hughes

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Hawk Roosting-By Ted Hughes
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Ted Hughes

• 1930 to 1998
• In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their
  list of "The 50 greatest British writers since
  1945".
• Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in nature
  and, in particular, the innocent savagery of
  animals, an interest from an early age. He wrote
  frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence
  in the natural world.
• Hughes's father, a joiner, had joined the
  Lancashire Fusiliers and fought at Ypres. 30 000
  had joined nearly half were killed in action. A
  bullet narrowly escaped killing William Hughes
  when it lodged in a paybook in his breast pocket.
  He was one of just 17 men of his regiment to
  return from the Dardanelles Campaign (191516).
  The stories of Flanders fields filled Hughes'
  childhood imagination. Hughes noted, "my first
  six years shaped everything."

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Power corrupts absolute power corrupts
absolutely
"One death is a tragedy a million is a
statistic."
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Some people think that Hughes is

• Praising the bird, its single-minded
  determination and its freedom.
• Neutral about the bird, and just describing it
  objectively.
• Criticising the bird for seeing itself as so self
  important
• Using the bird as a metaphor for the extreme
  state of mind of a human dictator.

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Different interpretations (A)

• Some people have suggested that the mind of the
  hawk represents the mind of a dictator. The Hawk
  sees the world in the same violent and
  narcissistic way as a supreme dictator such as
  Stalin or Hitler.
• Can you identify lines in the poem that make the
  Hawk sound like a dictator?

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Power corrupts absolute power corrupts
absolutely
"One death is a tragedy a million is a
statistic."
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That bird is accused of being a fascist the
symbol of some horrible genocidal dictator.
Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk
Nature was thinking. Simply Nature.

• From an interview with the author Ted Hughes in
  the London Magazine January 1971