Evening Hawk Insight

In the 1975 poem "Evening Hawk," for example, the sight of the hawk in flight leads to a state of acute attunement with the world. "If there were no wind we might, we think, hear / The earth grind on its axis, or history / Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar" (19-21). But it is important to note the qualifiers and negatives in the verse: "If there were no wind," "we might," "we think." Even the two activities, the grinding of the earth and the dripping of history, create a problem in exact interpretation because the first is placed solidly in the realm of nature and the second has been defined by Warren as the myth man lives (Brother to Dragons, Foreword, xiii). Moreover, the image of history is troubling and quotidian rather than sublime. Though human beings may be moved by sights in nature to vision, pattern, or design, Warren keeps that vision grounded, so to speak, by emphasizing inherent human limitations.

Bloom is certainly correct in seeing Warren’s hawk as a distinct achievement in the Romantic tradition. Warren’s hawk is not Bryant’s waterfowl, or Whitman’s untranslatable hawk, or even Stevens’ ambiguous, undulating pigeons. He does, however, bear a strong resemblance to Melville’s Man-of-War Hawk, whose flight is a "placid supreme" that neither thought nor arrow can attain, an image and a comment which suggest man’s painful and destructive eschatological search. Warren’s hawk is similarly beyond "Time and error" and is also "unforgiving." Yet the hawk alone does not stand for Warren’s vision in the poem. The bat replaces the hawk at night and "cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics" (16), a term that suggests both that man can "read" nature to learn something about himself and that this reading is difficult because it requires interpretation