Ted Hughes’s ‘Hawk Roosting’: A Posthumanist Perspective

Abstract

The entire body of Ted Hughes’s poetry has enjoyed and is still enjoying a wide readership for the brilliant treatment of its theme which is at once unique and universal. The style with which he has graced his poems, mostly on birds and animals, also showcases his craftsmanship as a poet. Accordingly, much scholarship is available on the poet and his poetry. Ted Hughes is outwardly designated or commonly understood as an animal lover/poet. But this is not or ought not to be his only identity, for a recent reading of most of his poems unearths his another side–a side that is present within the thematic texture of these poems but has not been explored as such. Some of his poems robustly deal with his posthumanist thinking. Under the garb of symbol, the poems foreground, among other aspects, the poet’s criticism of the humanist discourse of man as a distinguished and sublime creature occupying the centre of creation. One of these poems, which has been chosen for its relatively more poignant edge of such criticism, is ‘Hawk Roosting’, which tears asunder the veil over ‘man’ to display his greed, selfishness and brutality. The poem breaks the humanist bastion of man into pieces and locates him on the ground of reality by exposing his bleak characteristics which posthumanism tends to focus upon. This paper will, therefore, argue for the unfailing presence of Hughes’s posthumanist facets in the given poem through a discourse-based qualitative methodology.