In a message dated 2/11/2016 10:31:02 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx offers what he calls 'a revised view' of this
controversial poem, which I think has been called, inter alia, 'fascist' --
even if
Ted Hughes never visited Rome!
Anyway, Helm writes:
"[w]hereas in "the Hawk in the Rain" Hughes watches the hawk, admires it,
but knows it will one day be smashed, in the uncollected poem "Hawk
Roosting" Hughes becomes the hawk."
I like 'uncollected'. It reminds me of ... Grice. Once R. E. Grandy and R.
O. Warner were preparing a list of Grice's publications -- and Grice said:
GRICE: But surely you should make a note or two on those things I have NOT
published?
GRANDY & WARNER [both first names's is "Richard" and Grice referred to
them collectively as "Richards"]: But how should we call that stuff?
GRICE: Well, if you are listing my publications, I guess you can also list
my UNpublications.
----- The idea that some poems are uncollected is thus Griceian in nature.
Helm goes on:
"Perhaps I have been influenced over
the years by anti-Hughes rants but he has been frequently described as a
predator, chalking up female conquests."
We should perhaps explore the etymology of 'predate':
The Latin noun "praedator" is a derivation from "praedari", a deponent
verb (as Geary calls them) that means "to rob".
--- INTERLUDE: Lewis & Short
Lewis & Short in their Oxford Latin Dictionary expand on synonyms of 'rob'
as used by the Ancient Romans -- all covered by 'praedor':
to make booty
to plunder
to spoil
to rob
to pillage
ravish
take
to take or catch animals, birds, etc.:
------ "alia dentibus praedantur, alia unguibus"
------- Plinio 10, 71, 91, § 196:
------- "ovem", Ovidio, A. A. 3, 419:
------- "pisces calamo praedabor", Prop. 4 (5), 2, 37.—
---- END OF INTERLUDE.
Helm goes on:
"Even if that were not true (and I think it is) I would think he would
want to avoid identifying himself
(to his readers) as a predator, and not just any predator but one
(unlike the hawk in the rain) who holds Creation in his foot."
This seems fine. Apparently, the symbology of animal poetry in Hughes is
there to IMPLICATE a minimisation of man. While the contrast between the
fit-to-survive 'hawk' in the rain and the clumsy human (whose 'tractor broke
down,' to use McEvoy's implicature -- i.e. that depends too much on the
'artificial') is obvious, the fact that Hughes sticks to just the first-person
in "Hawk roosting" makes all this issue of identification more, er,
implicatural.
Helm:
"Now
perhaps this “creation” is his writing of poetry, but the poem must
stand on the obvious level as well; which means Hughes identifying
himself as a predator. But Hughes is probably a different sort of hawk: "I
sit in the top of
the wood, my eyes closed." I have several photos of hawks sitting near
or at the top of trees, but I can't quite picture one sitting at the top
of a wood (of course the “wood” is developed more fully in “A Modest
Proposal” and he may be meaning the same thing in this poem: the realm
of poetry)."
Well, then there's Norwegian wood. It should be noted that
i. I sit.
is perhaps not the very lexeme that the hawk would use. I mean, when _I_
sit, I'm not standing. And if I'm in the top of a wood, I wouldn't say that
I'm _just_ "sitting" there. But 'sit' is a nice short Anglo-Saxon
monosyllable and Hughes was possibly not going to care to find a better
synonym for
how to describe how the hawk would define his 'being' "in the top of the
wood".
McEvoy would possibly say that the 'clear' implicature is that since humans
sit on chairs, there is a chair in the top of the wood (= the realm of
poetry).
Helm:
"As to their eyes being closed, they never seem to miss our
approach. The idea of surprising a hawk in a tree is inconceivable to me."
I think his eyes are closed because he is dreaming -- no falsifying dream,
though -- but thinking of his next kill and eat. Note that the lid is
evolutionary. Fish, for example, as Geary notes, cannot sit in the top of a
wood
with their eyes closed.
Why don't fish have eye lids?
To answer what may sound like a silly Griceian (i.e. implicatural) question
(cfr. "Why is the Pope Catholic?") the answer really takes us back to the
evolutionary history of the vertebrate eye which is the same basic
structure in fish, hawks, and humans -- such as Ted Hughes, O. M.
The eye first evolved in the ancestors of fish.
It’s well-suited to an aquatic environment where its surface is kept moist
all the time.
The fish's eye isn’t so well-suited to exposure to the air where it could
dry out.
The reason fish don’t have eyelids is because under water they don’t need
eye lids -- and by Griceian maxims, a fish's eyelid would be _otiose_.
Not having an eye lid does NOT mean (even if it may wrongly implicate to
some) that the fish can’t go to sleep -- as Ted Hughes's hawk roosting is --
'no falsifying dream,' though.
Many humans do experience falling asleep with the radio on.
The reason you can do this is because sleep isn’t a complete lack of
awareness of what’s going on in your surroundings.
It’s a period of reduced responses to external stimuli.
In the case of the hawk roosting of Ted Hughes, O. M., the hawk is still
'wanting to keep things like this' and planning his next beheading of a
living prey.
But back to eyelidless fish, not having eyelids to completely shut out the
light does NOT mean that fish can’t sleep -- and dream.
I'm sure Hughes would say that a shark should have NO FALSIFYING DREAM (Not
a whale, because a whale is not a fish -- even if 'fisshe' was used by the
Anglo-Saxons to describe this swimming mammal).
Ae recent study on zebra fish – a common fish kept as pets -- shows that
these fish can fall asleep and when they’re sleeping they sink to the bottom
of the tank and their tails kind of droop down as they become more relaxed.
Not the hawk roosting of Ted Hughes, OM!
Hughes's hawk roosting is MOST ATTENTIVE with his eyes closed, because he
can THINK and nothing otiose distracts him.
A friend of mine noted that some zebra fish (that he has) apparently even
experience insomnia, though. But this is difficult to falsify from a
Popperian point of view.
Learning how long and how often fish can sleep for (and it’s quite a new
area) could help us with understanding sleep problems in hawks and humans.
Helm goes on:
""Inaction, no falsifying dream / Between my hooked head and hooked
feet:" He isn't moving and if he is dreaming it isn't a false dream.
It is a dream "between" his head and feet" presumably meaning the
reality of him, hooked, the hook being weapon-like; although I'm not
sure "between" works at this point. And if he is sleeping and dreams it
is all about killing and eating which is what he is all about -- an
unconflicted predator (Killing and eating being Hughes symbol, perhaps,
of writing poetry). "Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat." Why
does Hughes anthropomorphize this hawk as himself? What is killing and
eating a metaphor of if not for the conquests he was engaging in prior
to the time of this poem? Does it really work as a symbol for his writing?"
While I like 'anthropomorphise', it seems the philosophy of Ted Hughes, OM,
was that MAN was inferior to NON-human animals. So, perhaps we should
careful about 'anthropomorphisation'. One of his translations was Ovid's tales
-- and in these fables, a human human becomes a non-human animal. Geary
says that the figure of speech for a human being transformed into an animal is
'animalisation', but he is aware that this may offend a nun or a monk.
Catholics, but not Ancient Romans, distinguish between
-- anima
-- animus
Animals are thus called because they have anima, and animus. Recently, a
child approached the Pope because he was very sad about his recently died
dog. The Pope reasssured him that for Catholics, dogs go to heaven -- their
souls (animae) do.
So 'animalisation' should be taken, metaphorically, with a 'pinch of salt',
because we are working with the implicature that 'animal' means 'non-human
animal'. (Geary thinks finding a verb that derives from the Greek 'zoon'
should work better).
Helm:
"In the second stanza this hawk is viewing the woods as being for his
convenience, the high trees, air's buoyancy and the suns's ray "are of
advantage to me" / And the earth's face upward for my inspection"
[quite an arrogant hawk] continues in stanza three "My feet are locked
upon he rough bark. / It took the whole of Creation / To produce my
foot, my each feather: / Now I hold Creation in my foot /" [One must
come to a decision about whether Hughes is identifying with this hawk,
as he seems to be, writing as he is in the first person" or disapproving
of this hawk's arrogance which, it seems to me, involves reading into
the poem something that isn't there."
There's also a third option: that Hughes is AGREEING or supporting the
hawk's arrogance, but intending that it may offend his addressees. That would
be, technically, 'something that isn't there'.
On top, there are what the philosopher J. L. Austin called the
'perlocutionary effects': Ted Hughes, OM, can describe neutrally the hawk's
arrogance,
regardless of what perlocutionary effect (not part of the poem's meaning)
it may have on this or that addressee.
Helm:
"Beyond that, the symbol being used
for Hughes' poetic process requires reading even more into his poem.]
Repeating the last line of stanza three "Now I hold Creation in my foot"
/ and continuing on to stanza four: "Or fly up, and revolve it all
slowly -- /
I kill where I please because it is all mine. / There is no sophistry in
my body: / My manners are tearing off heads -- /" And on to stanza
five: "The allotment of death. / For the one path of my flight is direct
/ Through the bones of the living. / No arguments assert my right: /"
[He needs no arguments to assert his right because his "might" does that
for him and in the last stanza the sun asserts his right as well being
behind him: "The sun is behind me. / Nothing has changed since I began.
/ My eye has permitted no change. / I am going to keep things like this."]
"Hawk Roosting," according to the note on page 1244 of the 2003 edition
of Ted Hughes, Collected Poems was written in 1959. Hughes would have
been 28 or 29. Was he feeling arrogant back then, was he critical of
people who seemed arrogant, or is he merely using the image of the hawk
killing and eating as an arcane symbol of his poetic process."
Well, 'Hawk roosting' seems to be (c) 1960 since it appeared in "Lupercal".
It is uncollected, or was uncollected by Hughes.
There's Hughes's "Collected poems,", collected or edited by Paul Keegan.
And Hughes's "Selected poems" and "New selected poems". Hughes's "Collected
poems" -- not by himself, who would rather 'select' -- came out
posthumously. He didn't need to select "Hawk roosting", it having appeared in
the early
"Lupercal".
Note that the hawk holds Creation on his foot -- it took the whole of
Creation to produce his feet, his "each feather".
And do hawks flock together?
After all, the idiom goes that birds -- in general -- do. I ask this
because if
Sylvia Plath = the hawk in the rain
Ted Hughes = the hawk roosting
that would implicate that Plath and Hughes flocked together (assuming the
implicature that they were of a 'feather').
Cheers,
Speranza
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