19 pages • 38 minutes read
Evening Hawk
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Picnic Remembered” by Robert Penn Warren (1942)
This poem appeared in Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, Warren’s second book. It contains seven stanzas of seven lines and employs a rhyme scheme. The speaker of the poem remembers a pleasant picnic. Under the “amber light” (Line 9), the couple seems to have “our perfections stilled and framed / to mock Time’s marveling after-spies” (Lines 13-14). However, the speaker soon sees this golden day to have been an illusion and subsumed by shadow. They find that “we did not know / How darkness darker staired below” (Lines 19-20). Now, “our clearest souls / [A]re sped” (Lines 37-38).
Like “Evening Hawk,” a hawk appears in this poem to stand in for the “soul” (Line 44), which has “fled / [o]n glimmering wings past vision’s path” (Lines 44-45). Again, the hawk is a messenger, and the poem addresses similar bifurcations of lightness and shadow that Warren would imagistically use again 33 years later.
“A Way to Love God” by Robert Penn Warren (1975)
This poem first appeared directly before “Evening Hawk” in the collection Can I See Arcturus From Where I Stand? (1975). “A Way to Love God” discusses how the speaker lies awake knowing the “perfected pain of conscience” (Line 12) due to “something they cannot remember” (Line 11), which has “burdened [their] tongue” (Line 14). They urge the addressee to observe the world and note that “everything seems an echo of something else” (Line 21). This image is echoed in “Evening Hawk,” in the futility of the “gold of our error” (Line 11).
This poem also uses an animal as metaphor. This time, there are “sheep huddling” (Line 29) who “stare into nothingness” (Line 30). This is a softer image than the hawk’s “scyth[ing] down another day” (Line 8). Rather than indicating the passage of time, the sheep makes the speaker feel “nothing would ever again happen” (Line 36), and this moment of stillness “may be a way to love God” (Line 37). This sense of appreciation of the natural image is echoed in the next poem, when “the star / [is] steady [...] over the mountain” (Lines 19-20).
“Mortal Limit” by Robert Penn Warren (1983)
This poem was published in The Sewanee Review in 1983. It also details the flight of a hawk at sunset. The hawk in this poem also “ride[s] updraft” (Line 1) from “coniferous darkness” (Line 2) into “dream-spectral light” (Line 4). The speaker in this poem also addresses death and/or failure in the hawk’s “dying vision” (Line 10). The imagery and the subject matter echo “Evening Hawk,” but the form is fixed, a Shakespearean sonnet.
Further Literary Resources
“Robert Penn Warren: A Vision” by Kentucky Educational Television (2018)
This hour-long PBS special, produced by Kentucky Educational Television, gives an overview of Warren’s life and career, starting with his birth in the small town of Guthrie, Kentucky, his schooling at Vanderbilt, followed by his illustrious career. The documentary touches on the natural imagery that populates Warren’s work, as well as his intellectual questioning, particularly regarding his feelings about the South and civil rights.
Although “Evening Hawk” is not among them, excerpts of several of his works are presented, with footage of the poet, his family, and commentary by noted historians and biographers.
“‘The Snow Filled Forest’: Robert Frost’s Influence on Robert Penn Warren” by King Adkins (2006)
This critical article from Volume 6 of Robert Penn Warren Studies details the literary influences the British Romantic poets and Modernists had on Warren, settling into a discussion on how, in his later career, Warren embraced the work of American poet Robert Frost.
Adkins mentions how “Warren goes on to observe that Frost ordered his ‘literal materials so that, in looking back upon them as the poem proceeds, the reader suddenly realizes they have been transmuted’ into metaphor or philosophical indicators” (62). Adkins goes on to suggest that Warren uses a similar technique in “Evening Hawk."
“Plato's Timaeus” by Donald Zeyl for Stanford University’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2022)
Stanford University’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides extensive information about philosophic theories, including those of Plato, and explains them in both summary form and in detailed contribution. As a literary scholar, Warren was familiar with Platonic concepts, including those of the fixed star and the allegory of the cave.
Zeyl’s entry on the Timaeus dialogue (320 BC) directly connects with “Evening Hawk,” but the idea of form and shadow laid out in the allegory of the cave may also prove insightful. This, too, can be found in the encyclopedia.
"Rise, fall of Arcturus" by Delaware Gazette (2019)
This news article from the Delaware Gazette provides facts about the star Arcturus and explains where it is in the sky. It also includes a brief discussion of its mythology in many different cultures, and its connection to Ursa Major.
“Evening Hawk” was first published in Warren’s collection Can I See Arcturus From Where I Stand? (1975), and “the star” (Line 20) featured in the poem may be this star.
Listen to Poem
Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord reads Warren’s poem for the You Come Too Poetry Series featuring Vermont poets, broadcast on December 18, 2017.
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By Robert Penn Warren
