"Hawk Roosting" by Ted Hughes.

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“Hawk Roosting” by Ted Hughes

In a successful Dramatic Monologue the voice of a speaker is an important element. Show how particular features of the language used by the speaker are effective in revealing the speaker’s personality to the audience.

“Hawk Roosting” by Ted Hughes is a successful Dramatic Monologue in which the voice of the speaker, the Hawk, is an important element. Many features of the language Ted Hughes uses in this poem reveal various aspects of the personality that the Hawk has acquired to the reader.

One of the most distinct aspects of the Hawks personality is of arrogance. In stanza two the reader is told of the many advantages that the Hawk believes nature has given to him especially:

“The convenience of the high trees! The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray are of an advantage to me.”

Ted Hughes’ use of the word “convenience” shows that the Hawk assumes that the trees are there for his use and have only been formed for his advantage. The use of the word “buoyancy” to describe the air not only suggests the air’s great ability to keep the Hawk high in the sky but it also indicates the Hawks slight cheerfulness and resilience.

His arrogance is continued in the following line where he describes the position of the earth below him:

“And the earth’s face upward for my inspection”.

This metaphor suggests that the Hawk feels superior and more important than everything and everybody else and builds upon the idea of the Hawk looking down on the rest of the world, not only because he is flying high in the sky but also because he believes he is ‘better’ than what is below him.

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 This idea carries on to the next stanza where he is contemplating how perfect his features appear:

“It took the whole of creation to produce my foot, my each feather”.

The Hawks expanded description of his foot shows the delicacy of his features and reveals the vain character that he is. With this, combined with the repetition of “my”, it appears that the Hawk believes most of the work done by “Creation” was to produce him. The repetition of “Creation” in these lines is very important. The use of this word introduces religion into the poem, in particular ...

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There are attempts to analyse the poem and the writer shows some level of understanding. However, the absence of a title means that the essay lacks a focus and as a result, the analysis takes a chronological approach, often leading to a narrative summary of the poem. A focused question with a clearly planned answer would have led to a more developed analysis. Increased exploration of poetic devices (present tense, language style, structural choices to name a few) and their effects would have improved the content of the essay. It is also important to recognise that any reading of the poem, for example how it might be a metaphorical comment on power, is only one interpretation. **