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- The speaker of the poem is a hawk who is looking down on the earth beneath him.
- He begins the poem perched at the top of a tree, waiting to swoop on his next pray.
- His attitude and tone are very arrogant and he compares himself to God.
- He is very proud of his place in the food chain and the fact he can choose who lives and who dies.
- He doesn’t want the natural order of things to be disrupted.
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- In the title of the poem ‘”roosting” suggests the hawk is still, not a swooping bird of prey as we may imagine. This gives a sense of the hawk meditating on his powers of destruction.
- The tone is haughty. The hawk is focussed and not distracted – “no falsifying dream”.
- The language creates an arrogance to the hawk – “I hold Creation in my foot”, “it is all mine”.
- There is a sense of control and that the hawk is playing God throughout the poem – “allotment of death”.
- Final words – “I am going to keep things like this” shows the power that the hawk has. It is a statement suggesting he is king of the animal kingdom and untouchable.
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- The poem is made up of four line stanzas – controlled, like the hawk is controlling his environment.
- The steady and calm pace to the poem again mirrors the hawk’s measured control over the woodland – he will not be rushed by anyone.
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- Ted Hughes was Poet Laureate until his death in 1984 and wrote many poems about the natural world.
- Hughes said the poem wasn’t about cruelty – he just wanted to show a hawks ‘natural way of thinking’
- Hughes's 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.
- Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a struggle for the survival of the fittest in the same way that humans strive for ascendancy and success.
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