Evening Hawk (1977). Content and Description

“Evening Hawk” first appeared in a series of 10 new poems, Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? from the collection Selected Poems: 1923-1975. In six stanzas of varying length Warren describes movement through space in free verse with swooping rhythms that depict flight. Like birds, stars, and suns in Warren’s late poetry, the hawk (and later the bat in the poem’s third stanza) is sublime, a romantic image of aweinspiring beauty and a divine presence that reaps stalks of grain “with the gold of our error” as it descends (2.1).

Ironically, as Harold Bloom points out, “What is being harvested is our fault, and yet that mistake appears as golden grain” (204). Such a paradox has biblical overtones, the sort of transformative regeneration and rebirth that Jesus describes as the “harvest” in the “parable of the seed that grows mysteriously”:

He also said [to the disciples], “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” (Mark 4: 26-29 Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition)

The purpose of this parable is to teach the disciples about the Kingdom of God, which Jesus describes in the fourth chapter of Mark as a mysterious plan connected with the sowing of the word: the use of language, in this case the parable, but in Warren’s case, the poem, to communicate mystery, to draw the listener/reader into an experience that defies rational explanation. Jesus employs the image of the harvest, a time of celebration in which the fruits of the earth are reaped, to instill hope in the disciples, who are experiencing a crisis of faith.

“Evening Hawk,” as the Mark parable, describes an unbelieving world that lies under the shadow of the hawk’s wing. As in the parable, Warren’s poem describes a fallen world under the gaze of a divine presence that reaps the harvest: the Hawk’s wings cut (“scythe”) like “that of a honed steel-edge” (1.2). In Warren’s poem humanity, unforgiven, is set apart, capable of witnessing sublimity but unable to climb the last light, cut off from transcendence, timelessness, the very things to which the poet aspires but can never attain.

In the third stanza the hawk is replaced by a bat, whose “wisdom / Is ancient, too, and immense” and “Who knows neither Time nor error,” and does not participate in the process of decay known as history, an experience endemic to the human race, one we live as imperfect beings caught in the field of time, forever erring, forever falling short of a platonic ideal.

For Warren, we exist in a world grinding on its axis, a place where we labor, as does Sisyphus, who forever pushes the rock up an incline in Hades, only to see it fall and then begin the cycle anew. Yet, such visions as the hawk flying at sunset frame our existence, providing the ultimate horizon—whether we name it death, faith, belief, salvation, nothingness, or God—that defines our lives.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins is another poem that attempts to approximate the rhythms of flight through innovative use of poetic meter. Read both poems aloud; notice where they speed up and slow down. Now compare Hopkins’s usage of meter with Warren’s, noting how each affects you as a reader.

2. Despite the images of forgiveness in the second and third stanzas, the fourth stanza describes the hawk’s eye as “unforgiving” and refers to the world as “unforgiven.” Why do you think this is? In what way(s) do these lines make reading the hawk as a Christ figure problematic? Do they render a reading so ambiguous as to be impossible, or does the ambiguity enhance your experience as a reader?

 






Date added: 2025-01-09; views: 7;


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