Symbolism In Hawk Roosting

Hughes has observed animals more accurately than any other poet, capturing every characteristic upto the limits of the languages. His insight is so deep, his rendering is so vivid that the reader is left spell-bound. The poem which really establishes Hughes reputation as a poet of the world of animals is ‘Hawk Roosting’. The poem presents the meditation of the hawk from his point of view. Hughes’s Hawk retains all of its predatory characteristics and yet symbolizes the Darwinian aspect of Nature. Ted Hughes himself explained this symbolism in an interview to the London Magazine in January 1971.

“The bird is accused of being a fascist.., the symbol of some horrible genocide dictator,” The fact is that ‘Hawk Roosting’ is the only poem in ‘Lupercal’

Hughes is fascinated by all kinds of violence – violence in love as well as in hatred, violence in the jungle, violence in battles and violence in the form of murder and sudden death. Ted has broken new grounds by dealing with the dark, psychic, violent forces talent in modern life. On the contrary, Michael Parker has expressed the view that Hughes violent imagery in his poems shows the continuance of the imperialistic sense of power among the English people. According to this critic, Hughes’s violent imagery is closely allied with authoritarian politics. But it not only the egotism of violence which interests Hughes. At the heart of much of his poetry is violence as a pure expression of spirit, violence as an assertion of identity. In this connection, the closing lines of the poem ‘Pike’ are significant. The narrator’s dream here is a dream of violence. This is not without a basis because the English people have always been more aggressive and war-like than they think, and the imperialism which the critic has talked about in connection with Hughes is really dear to the heart of