Hawk Roosting-By Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes

• 1930 to 1998

•In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

• Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world.

• Hughes's father, a joiner, had joined the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought at Ypres. 30 000 had joined; nearly half were killed in action. A bullet narrowly escaped killing William Hughes when it lodged in a paybook in his breast pocket. He was one of just 17 men of his regiment to return from the Dardanelles Campaign (1915–16). The stories of Flanders fields filled Hughes' childhood imagination. Hughes noted, "my first six years shaped everything."

"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely

Some people think that Hughes is:

• Praising the bird, its single-minded determination and its freedom.

• Neutral about the bird, and just describing it objectively.

• Criticising the bird for seeing itself as so self important

• Using the bird as a metaphor for the extreme state of mind of a human dictator.

Different interpretations (A*)

• Some people have suggested that the mind of the hawk represents the mind of a dictator. The Hawk sees the world in the same violent and narcissistic way as a supreme dictator such as Stalin or Hitler.

• Can you identify lines in the poem that make the Hawk sound like a dictator?

"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely

“That bird is accused of being a fascist… the symbol of some horrible genocidal

dictator. Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk Nature was thinking.

Simply Nature.”

From an interview with the author Ted Hughes in the London Magazine January 1971