In his essay, “Violence, Violation, and the Limits of Ethics in Robinson Jeffers’ ‘Hurt Hawks,’” Jordan L. Green asserts that “Hurt Hawks” is a poem that is both “a harsh portrayal of an unforgiving wilderness” and a challenge “of the notion that the human, through reason and language, is the dominant being in the world” (Green 13). Green argues this campaign to include the nonhuman in the ethical sphere is executed through “rhetorical and thematic violence and violation” (13).
According to Green, the rhetorical power of “Hurt Hawks” “lies in its coldly violent tone and imagery… jolting narrative breaks, shifts in voice that alter the reader’s relationship to the subjects of the poem, and finally in its resignation to the impossibility of language to the express the sublime” (14). He continues to suggest that the poem’s first fourteen lines feature a third-person voice that is detached and keeps the readers distanced from the torment and pain of the hawk’s condition. However, the poem shifts in line 15 as the poem’s tone becomes accusatory, bringing the reader “into blunt contact with the speaker, who pulls him or her into the hawk’s psychological space and the ethical realm of the poem” (Green 14). Jeffers implicates his readers for their forgetting of the hawk and conforming to a notion of humanity that “has fallen irreparably from the grace of the ‘wild God’” (Green 15). Green argues these accusations are taken a step further in the second stanza when Jeffers no longer “simply criticize[s] our narrow perspective or lapsed memory; he threatens us with death” (15). When the speaker admits he would rather “kill a man than a hawk,” he no longer serves only as the poem’s narrator but “an antagonistic agent who destroys any aesthetic distance we may have had from the poem’s violence” (Green 15). Green believes that since this statement serves little narrative purpose, it is purely a direct ethical statement.
Green then focuses on the event of the hawk’s death. He suggests that the speaker acknowledges both the hawk’s current misery and its fierce pride, strength and nobility, and by doing so reveals a deep and profound compassion for the animal. That compassion is extended to the speaker’s mournful realization that for the hawk to again be free, the speaker must relieve it of its mortal agony. Green refutes pasts critics’ suggestions that this act is shameful and cowardly, and argues that “in the killing moment the speaker appears a worthy example of humanity by satisfying the Inhumanist imperative. By releasing the hawk from its miserable corporeality, he realizes the transhuman magnificence and allows us, through the experience of the poem, the same possibility” (16).
Green’s subsequent argument is that the “fierce rush” following the death of the hawk, and the speaker’s seeming inability to express the majesty of the moment in words, conveys the ultimate triumph of the inhuman and the sublime in the poem. He asserts that what “‘Hurt Hawks’ accomplishes through the valuation of the hawk’s life over human life and the ultimate failure of its language… is the marginalization of the human. The poem thus reverses the common trajectory of definition in determining the human in relation to the hawk and the fierce rush, making us other to them. This violent reversal is the ethical crux of this poetic act” (19). This, combined with the poem’s implication of humanity through rhetoric, and its narrative release of freedom and nobility from the hawk rather than the human, renders “Hurt Hawks” a compelling expression of Jeffers’ ethical philosophy.