Evening Hawk

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“Evening Hawk” has 23 lines divided into six uneven stanzas in its 1975 form. In some electronic versions, spacing and stanza breaks are removed. Stanza 2, beginning with “His wing” (Line 7), and Stanza 5, beginning with “Long now,” (Line 16) are both indented. The lines themselves do not individually possess a patterned meter and thus are free verse.

Warren’s principal organization instead comes through breaking the poem into stanzas. Stanza 1 (Lines 1-6) centers on a description of the hawk’s flight across the sky against the mountain. Stanza 2 (Lines 7-10) goes on to describe the sharpness of his wing and the passage of time. Stanza 3, only Line 11, hones in on human fallibility. The same pattern of meaning is repeated in the next three stanzas.

Stanza 4 (Lines 12-15) once again discusses the hawk’s flight, while Stanza 5 (Lines 16-20) further describes nature’s objects and what remains wise and fixed. The poem concludes with notations on the passage of time in Stanza 6 (Lines 21-23). This back-and-forth motion between the natural objects in the poem and the speaker’s feelings help to mimic the struggle one might have finding solace in the face of imminent death.

Personification

Late in “Evening Hawk,” the allusion to Plato (Line 20) cues us into the fact that the speaker wants us to embrace the idea that Death is the necessary conclusion of a life. Like the winged creatures in the poem, we must learn to be comfortable with the quotidian processes of the natural world (Line 12). Natural creatures seem to accept that death is an unassailable inevitability, whereas humans struggle with aging.

Warren’s speaker uses personification to make the vastness of nature more familiar so that joining nature in death will not feel as intimidating. That nature is alive—and we are a part of it—is shown in the speaker’s imbuing nature with human-like characteristics, creating sympathy between the harshness of nature and the human condition. The sunset “builds” (Line 2) like a craftsman, and the world “swings” (Line 14) into shadow. The “stalks of Time” (Line 10) have “head[s]” (Line 11) weighed down by their misgivings just as we do. The “guttural gorge” (Line 5) seems to have a throat, and the bat uses “sharp hieroglyphics” (Line 18) to communicate. It possesses “wisdom” as does the Hawk.

The “star / [is] steady” (Lines 19-20) like Plato, and the personification urges us to be so as well. Death comes regardless, but perhaps we, too, should fear “neither Time or error” (Line 13), and instead “cruis[e]” (Line 18) the sky, embracing our wisdom as a natural creature instead of an intellectual one.

Visual and Auditory Imagery

Warren’s speaker uses a contrast between visual and auditory images to juxtapose the natural world, which can be seen with inner doubt that is heard in negative whispers. This increases the effect that the natural world is a clearer guide to how to approach death. Visual imagery is used to ground us in the reality of that world: the sky, its sunset, and animals like the “hawk” (Line 6), the “thrush,” (Line 17), and the “bat” (Line 17). It is also the primary technique used to enliven objects in the setting. The “mountain” (Lines 3, 20), the “gorge” (Line 5), the “pines” (Line 5), and the “star” (Line 20) are all clearly rendered. Further, the way the light and shadow work at twilight is described in vivid, visual terms, painted as the “geometries and orchids that the sunset builds” (Line 2).

By contrast, the deep fears that the speaker has regarding the passage of time are conveyed in images of negative sound. As another days passes, “we hear / [t]he crashless fall of stalks of Time” (Line 10). Without the wind under our wings, the speaker suggests, we would “hear / The earth grind on its axis” (Lines 21-22) and “history / [d]rip in darkness like a leaking pipe” (Lines 22-23). This exemplifies that what undoes us is human thought, our own self-evaluation. By contrast, the order of the natural world, although stark, can be coveted as vivid and true.