Hawks are High in the Poetry Stakes

More birds this week! This time I tease out some of the reasons the falcon has so long fascinated hunters, writers and, apparently, readers.

After discussing how birds are deployed in myth and allegory last time out, I began to think of the many manifestations of hawks in books and poetry. They also feature regularly in our daily language, from the journalist’s phrase, ‘hawks and doves’, to being hawkish, or hawk-eyed, or watching someone like a hawk. Their name is attached to sports teams, Seahawks (Seattle), Redhawks (Miami), fighter jets, Harriers and an underground band, Hawkwind.

Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash

It wasn’t until I visited a hawking centre that I discovered the verb ‘to cadge’ (a lift) derived from the frame used to carry hawks to and from their hunting grounds. In a modern variation on this medieval contraption I once saw a photograph of 75 falcons seated in a Boeing 747, apparently waiting for the cabin crew to come around with headsets and drinks. They belonged to a Saudi prince, who stood in the aisle supervising them.

Photo by Abdulaziz AlAbdullah on Unsplash

Our relationship with these birds of prey is twofold, symbolic and practical. Hawking, or falconry, is often associated with royalty (see above). When Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet says of his feigned madness that he is still sane enough to ‘know a hawk from a handsaw’ (Act II (ii)) he is not distinguishing between a bird and a carpenter’s tool but between two types of bird, the ‘handsaw’ being a ‘hernsaw’ or heron, symbol of cowardice.*

  Dedicating his poem ‘The Windhover’ to ‘Christ our Lord’ Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit priest and poet, draws on the vocabulary associated with monarchy:

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, 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! 

(From ‘The Windhover’ G.M. Hopkins, 30 May, 1877)

  The single ‘ing’ rhyme depends on the line break at the top, ‘king-/Dom’ reinforcing the word ‘king’ throughout the verse. Christ is ‘minion’ and ‘dauphin’, subject and heir apparent to the throne, while the Falcon, with his upper case, lords it over the lines, riding and striding high. The pun on ‘rein’, leads to the further pun on ‘mastery’, the master and the masterpiece. Underpinning the act of worship is the barely reined-in exuberance of the poet at capturing the bird’s flight in words, thus dramatising the stirring of his heart. 

  For W. B. Yeats falconry is an image of control whose loss opens his vision of chaos in the coming times :

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

. . .  

‘The Second Coming’ (1919)

Writing in the aftermath of the First World War, and as Ireland spiralled into civil war, Yeats envisages the Second Coming not as Christ’s return but as a terrifying sphinx escorted by ‘shadows of the indignant desert birds’. The monstrous figure and desert setting recall Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), inspired by the archaeological finds made during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt.

This is the home of Horus, the hawk-headed god, mentioned in the last instalment of What’s the Story? The god’s right eye represented power, his left, healing, two properties that continue to be evoked in connection with the hawk today.**  

A little over a decade later, Robinson Jeffers also enlists the hawk as an emblem of our negotiations with a deity. In ‘Hurt Hawks’ (1932) the poet watches a wounded bird, his wing trailing ‘like a banner in defeat’ and reflects on the bird’s defiant patience in the face of death:

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.

The hawk is solitary, privileged by its lofty flight and ability to suspend itself in the air above its prey before swiftly striking. This is the astonishing power that kings and hunters have long tried to harness. Ted Hughes likewise invokes its mystical quality in ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ (1957):

. . . but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.

His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,

Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.

Later, as the poet feels himself going under he looks to the hawk in its ‘master-/ Fulcrum of violence’. A play on ‘masterful’ harking back to Hopkins’ ‘mastery’. 

Photo by Sharon Waldron on Unsplash

The word ‘master’ holds the key to our fascination with the hawk. In her memoir H is for Hawk (2014) Helen Macdonald trains a goshawk called Mabel as an antidote to grief for her father’s sudden death. After reading of the difficulty male falconers had in handling goshawks, which are female, she concludes:

I look at Mabel. She looks at me. So much of what she means is made of people. For thousands of years hawks like her have been caught and trapped and brought into people’s houses. But unlike other animals that have lived in such close proximity to man, they have never been domesticated. It’s made them a powerful symbol of wildness in myriad cultures, and a symbol too, of things that need to be mastered and tamed. [My emphasis]

The bird herself ‘. . . looks new. Looks as if the world cannot touch her. As if everything that exists and is observed rolls off like drops of water from her oiled and close-packed feathers.’ Despite this impression of invulnerability Mabel’s behaviour begins to mirror Macdonald’s as she gives way to grief and anger and slides into depression. When Macdonald recognises this reciprocation she tends to the bird and her depression begins to lift. Her narrative is counterpointed with that of T. H. White’s disastrously cruel attempt to tame a goshawk, reflecting his personal demons.***  

Hawks are several steps ahead of us. For all that we can catch them, convey them on our wrists, a cadge or a jet, they refuse to yield up their spirit and thus we admire and yearn towards them.

  The bird’s healing aura of otherworldliness is brilliantly and tragically portrayed in Ken Loach’s 1969 film Kes, based on a novel by Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave (1968). Hines took the title from a hierarchy of tamers in a medieval manual of falconry, The Boke of St. Albans, (1486) which begins, ‘An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King . . . a Merlin for a Lady . . . a Sparrohawk for a Priest . . .’ and ends with the knave. Hines and Loach’s knave is Billy Casper, a fifteen-year-old boy, growing up in a bleak northern England, bullied at school and at home. Billy’s finds joy, and a sense of vicarious freedom, through his bond with a kestrel, until his brother kills the bird. It is one of the saddest films I know and the cruelty it portrays is that of a broken and impoverished society that has lost touch with Jeffers’ ‘wild God’. 

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  * In researching this quote I came across this rather beautiful website, worth visiting for the illustrations alone: Birds of Shakespeare

** Yeats’ use of the word ‘gyre’ for spiral relates to his theory of history but there is also an uncanny echo in these lines of the identity of the gyrfalcon, largest of the species. The prefix ‘gyr’ here is of uncertain origin. Equally, I cannot be certain that Yeats knew of this specific bird but it is the one recommended for the king in the Boke of St. Albans, tightening the connection to Christ the King and Ozymandias (Rameses II).  

***Author of the quartet of Arthurian fantasy novels, The Once and Future King (1958) basis for the musical Camelot (stage show, 1960; film 1967).

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I had one request for more about birds so this is to say I act on requests and suggestions, when I can. Let me know your thoughts on hawks and other suitable topics for What’s the Story?