Evening Hawk

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1985

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Traditionally, Robert Penn Warren has been grouped with Southern poets, and particularly the Fugitives, the group made up of Vanderbilt teachers and students in the 1920s. However, his deeper interest in nature poetry and imagery also puts him in line with the earlier English Romantic poets from the 19th century, like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His interest in language led him to the works of dramatist William Shakespeare, and the Modernist T. S. Eliot was an admittedly important influence (See: Further Reading & Resources).

Shakespeare’s understanding of human character and Eliot’s themes about the meaning of human history and memory, along with his rhythmic cadence based on human speech, appealed to Warren. However, scholar King Adkins hints that as Warren’s work evolved, particularly after a decade where he did not write poetry (1943-1954), he also turned to American poet Robert Frost for inspiration. While Warren rejected Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideals, he responded to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sherwood Anderson, and particularly Frost.

Frost, like Warren, did not hold “Eliot and Ezra Pound[‘s] reference to authority and literary tradition” (60) but did explore nature in a philosophical sense. Adkins notes that Warren was seen as a poet who “embraced Romanticism and yet saw its impossibility in the Modern world” (59). His ability to capture natural phenomena in precise, vivid imagery and yet also use it to ask the deeper existential questions about human life make him still influential today. This can be seen by the wide anthologizing of a poem like “Evening Hawk.”

Philosophical Context

In “Evening Hawk,” Robert Penn Warren’s speaker tells us that the “star / [is] steady, like Plato, over the mountain” (Line 20). This allusion may cause one to wonder how the ancient Greek philosopher and his ideas might play into the poem’s theme of grappling with mortality. Plato’s dialogue Timaeus (circa 360 BC) may provide a hint as to the development of the philosophical nature of the poem.

In the dialogue, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Timaeus describes the creation of the world as a living creature whose perceptible body is shaped as a globe and ruled by the four elements (See: Further Reading & Resources). Timaeus then offers up the idea that the greater Soul of the Universe was blended, mixed, and divided among humans, each of whom is assigned a kindred star by the Creator. However, the soul’s entry into the human’s physical body “throws the previously regular motions of the soul into confusion as [it] is subjected to the forceful disturbances of internal bodily processes as well as the impact of external bodies upon it, particularly in sense experience” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In simple words, being a human is a challenge. One must navigate negative emotions—including desire, fear, and anger—as well as certain death.

Timaeus suggests that if the individual lives their time on earth well, surmounting their internal struggles, they will, as they approach death, return to live with their kindred star and enjoy immortal blessing. As Warren’s speaker struggles with the loss of Time, aging, and the “gold of [their] error” (Line 11), they realize they need a guidepost. This is found in both the “wisdom” of the natural creatures who inhabit the living world and Timaeus’s “steady” star. Plato’s philosophical ideas expressed here provide a major throughline of struggle and resolution for the speaker in “Evening Hawk.”