Examine a close reading of Songs of the Crow and Hawks Roosting by Ted Hughes in terms of critical commentaries.
In Songs of the Crow and Hawk Roosting Yorkshire native poet laureate Ted Hughes explicates the fraternity of nature by the amnesty toward their habitation, niche, mindless instincts and ferocity. These alien creatures nevertheless station themselves in the abodes of the human psyche. The whole of the countryside Yorkshire is a dwelling of mourning in funebrial of World Wars I and II. Thus “Hawk’s Roosting” is a hawk’s dramatic monologue of hawkishness,
exhibiting murderous instincts, malicious vivaciousness and manic egoism, infernal ruthlessness, precarious hubris, perilous arrogance, maleficent coldbloodness and gothic tyranny.
Hughes at his most disposition exhibited the aura of being the poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk, Falcon and Crow, mythologizing and psychologizing anecdotal memorabilia through penchant of restorative memory. Mythic or symbolic and elegiac or confessional poetry crafted by Ted Hughes are exemplified thus with Coleridgean vision and Wordsworthian candour.
Existence of the stark predatory personae of the hawks’ is emblematic of animalistic savagery and cannibalistic bestiality bereft of remorse and empathy in case of Hawk Roosting. The primitive and instinctive nature of its cold existence are further metaphorically represented within “the allotment of death” as implied by the superpower of “hooked beak” and “hooked feet”.
The futurity of nihilistic existentialism in the havoc and upheaval wreaked by the post World Wars allegorically critiques this satirical motif. Furthermore decadence and dehumanization along with
the fall of the legacy of Western civilization becomes the harbinger of the Hawk spirited personae espoused by the poetic voice. Harshness and ghastliness of the poetic voice examines the satiric scathing and incantatory conjuring of large scale nuclear annihilation, anarchic apocalypse and massive environmental cataclysm. Crow’s life and songs is an exposition of human hubris as an ecofeminist project in the vein of the tragic and mythic in the anthropocene.
That poetry consists of phrases that are soul feeding verses as declaimed by Seamus Heaney fruitfully resurrects in Ted Hughes’ Crows Song and the Hawk Roosting too. The poet laureate
remythologizes communion of heaven and earth resembles iconoclastic atonement and visceral bloody crucifixion. crows’ nailing of heaven and earth together/ So man cried with God’s voice and God bled with man’s blood… Thus life exemplified by crow song is an amoral but extraordinarily volcanic force in the aesthetic eloquence of darkness being lightened and speechlessness being speechified. Nonetheless traumatic memorabilia from the Great World
Wars I and II and Sylvia Plath’s suicidal death by the gas stove psychically embroils the cauldron of fantastic narrative poetry
‘Crows Song’ and ‘Hawks Roosting’.
Hughes’s re- mythologization of Crows after all symbolically
manifests inimical indifference of obliviousness embedded in human nature throughout a demythologized world.
Hughes like New Moderns re-enchants the contemporary historical socio economic and cultural milieu through ancient, antique, atavistic and primordial ballads, myths, legends, epics, folktales and fairytales into the British Isles and Britannic legacy. A wild destructive London night and a banging blasting ferocious love masculinizes the lovemaking by libidinal urges of Plathian eroticization. In this scenario, the penis envy enmeshes the metaphorical symbolization of dominance and power in the poems. The Hawks Roosting propounds the American symbolist spirit of the nationalist bird evoked by proud roosting posture and the image of the strong talons.
Further Reading
A History of Modern Poetry Modernism and After David Perkins
.