Robert Penn Warren
Evening Hawk
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense.
The starIs steady, like Plato, over the mountain.
If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.
Robert Penn Warren
And from http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/warren/evening.htm
On "Evening Hawk"
Harold Bloom (1984)
[Bloom’s overview of Warren’s career finds its focus on the images of the hawk or hawks repeated over several poems. Among a number of things it represents, the hawk is, Bloom suggests, "an emblem of certainty in pride and honor."]
… ["Evening Hawk"] is surely one of his dozen or so lyric masterpieces, a culmination of forty years of his art.
[Bloom quotes the whole poem.]
The hawk’s emotion is that of a scythe reaping time, but Warren has learned more than his distance from the hawk’s state of being. I know no single line in him grander that the beautifully oxymoronic "the head of each stalk Is heavy with the gold of our error." What is being harvested in our fault, and yet that mistake appears as golden grain. When the poet sublimely cries "Look! Look!" to us, I do not hear a Yeatsian exultation, but rather an acceptance of a vision that will forgive us nothing, and yet does not rejoice in that stance.
From Harold Bloom, "Sunset Hawk: Warren’s Poetry and Tradition," in Harold Bloom, Ed., Modern Critical Views: Robert Penn Warren (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 203-204.
Calvin Bedient (1984)
Warren’s most strenuous "Platonic" poem, "Evening Hawk," is torn between image and idea. As image, the hawk enshrines the poet’s Nietzschean love of heroism: as idea, it is the Platonic Good, the Platonic True. The poem attempts to break into allegory with
Look! Look! He is climbing the last lightWho knows neither Time nor Error, and underWhose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swingsInto shadow.
The poet cannot know all this except by wanting to believe it; here the mind ceases to be wholly realist, universal, and manly and becomes sharply, universally judgmental.
With its rhythmical loveliness – an evening lull quickened by hawk-motions – and its unrepentent sensory vividness, which triumphs at the end, and most of all the hawk’s animal vigor, the poem stays alive, however fought over from inside. The emotion remains true and intact, because the poet is not contemptuous of vitality per se, but only of vitality that fails. Here, vitality in its full power is consonant with Platonic freedom from death and error.
From Calvin Bedient, "His Varying Stance," Chapter 4 in In The Heart’s Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren’s Major Poetry (Cambridge: harvard U P, 1984), 166-167.
John Burt (1988)
Audubon’s birds, this is to say, are the stern celestials Warren himself celebrates in "Evening Hawk" and "The Leaf," those not-angels who know everything but mercy, of which they neither feel nor see the need, and who stand outside of time even as their motion is the motion of time’s ruthlessness. …
The bird of prey is not an emblem by means of which the necessity it embodies may be examined. If it stands for anything it stands for that contempt with which necessity spurns comprehension.
from John Burt, "Audobon and Evasion," Chapter 6 in Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (New Haven: Yale U P, 1988), 103-104.
From http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/17
A Way to Love God
by Robert Penn Warren
Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
And the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific
First leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know
About submarine geography, and your father's death rattle
Provides all biographical data required for the Who's Who of the dead.
I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least
I can say how night-long I have lain under the stars and
Heard mountains moan in their sleep. By daylight,
They remember nothing, and go about their lawful occasions
Of not going anywhere except in slow disintegration. At night
They remember, however, that there is something they cannot remember.
So moan. Theirs is the perfected pain of conscience that
Of forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it. I have.
I do not recall what had burdened my tongue, but urge you
To think on the slug's white belly, how sick-slick and soft,
On the hairiness of stars, silver, silver, while the silence
Blows like wind by, and on the sea's virgin bosom unveiled
To give suck to the wavering serpent of the moon; and,
In the distance, in plaza, piazza, place, platz, and square,
Boot heels, like history being born, on cobbles bang.
Everything seems an echo of something else.
And when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head
Of Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving,
But without sound. The lips,
They were trying to say something very important.
But I had forgotten to mention an upland
Of wind-tortured stone white in darkness, and tall, but when
No wind, mist gathers, and once on the Sarré at midnight,
I watched the sheep huddling. Their eyes
Stared into nothingness. In that mist-diffused light their eyes
Were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water,
Or of a scholar who has lost faith in his calling.
Their jaws did not move. Shreds
Of dry grass, gray in the gray mist-light, hung
From the side of a jaw, unmoving.
You would think that nothing would ever again happen.
That may be a way to love God.
From New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 by Robert Penn Warren, published by Random House. Copyright © 1985 by Robert Penn Warren. Used by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author.
Mortal Limit
by Robert Penn Warren
I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.
It rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags
Of mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming
Of dream-spectral light above the lazy purity of snow-snags.
There--west--were the Tetons. Snow-peaks would soon be
In dark profile to break constellations. Beyond what height
Hangs now the black speck? Beyond what range will gold eyes see
New ranges rise to mark a last scrawl of light?
Or, having tasted that atmosphere's thinness, does it
Hang motionless in dying vision before
It knows it will accept the mortal limit,
And swing into the great circular downwardness that will restore
The breath of earth? Of rock? Of rot? Of other such
Items, and the darkness of whatever dream we clutch?
From New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 by Robert Penn Warren, published by Random House. Copyright © 1985 by Robert Penn Warren. Used by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author.
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense.
The starIs steady, like Plato, over the mountain.
If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.
Robert Penn Warren
And from http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/warren/evening.htm
On "Evening Hawk"
Harold Bloom (1984)
[Bloom’s overview of Warren’s career finds its focus on the images of the hawk or hawks repeated over several poems. Among a number of things it represents, the hawk is, Bloom suggests, "an emblem of certainty in pride and honor."]
… ["Evening Hawk"] is surely one of his dozen or so lyric masterpieces, a culmination of forty years of his art.
[Bloom quotes the whole poem.]
The hawk’s emotion is that of a scythe reaping time, but Warren has learned more than his distance from the hawk’s state of being. I know no single line in him grander that the beautifully oxymoronic "the head of each stalk Is heavy with the gold of our error." What is being harvested in our fault, and yet that mistake appears as golden grain. When the poet sublimely cries "Look! Look!" to us, I do not hear a Yeatsian exultation, but rather an acceptance of a vision that will forgive us nothing, and yet does not rejoice in that stance.
From Harold Bloom, "Sunset Hawk: Warren’s Poetry and Tradition," in Harold Bloom, Ed., Modern Critical Views: Robert Penn Warren (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 203-204.
Calvin Bedient (1984)
Warren’s most strenuous "Platonic" poem, "Evening Hawk," is torn between image and idea. As image, the hawk enshrines the poet’s Nietzschean love of heroism: as idea, it is the Platonic Good, the Platonic True. The poem attempts to break into allegory with
Look! Look! He is climbing the last lightWho knows neither Time nor Error, and underWhose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swingsInto shadow.
The poet cannot know all this except by wanting to believe it; here the mind ceases to be wholly realist, universal, and manly and becomes sharply, universally judgmental.
With its rhythmical loveliness – an evening lull quickened by hawk-motions – and its unrepentent sensory vividness, which triumphs at the end, and most of all the hawk’s animal vigor, the poem stays alive, however fought over from inside. The emotion remains true and intact, because the poet is not contemptuous of vitality per se, but only of vitality that fails. Here, vitality in its full power is consonant with Platonic freedom from death and error.
From Calvin Bedient, "His Varying Stance," Chapter 4 in In The Heart’s Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren’s Major Poetry (Cambridge: harvard U P, 1984), 166-167.
John Burt (1988)
Audubon’s birds, this is to say, are the stern celestials Warren himself celebrates in "Evening Hawk" and "The Leaf," those not-angels who know everything but mercy, of which they neither feel nor see the need, and who stand outside of time even as their motion is the motion of time’s ruthlessness. …
The bird of prey is not an emblem by means of which the necessity it embodies may be examined. If it stands for anything it stands for that contempt with which necessity spurns comprehension.
from John Burt, "Audobon and Evasion," Chapter 6 in Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (New Haven: Yale U P, 1988), 103-104.
From http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/17
A Way to Love God
by Robert Penn Warren
Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
And the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific
First leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know
About submarine geography, and your father's death rattle
Provides all biographical data required for the Who's Who of the dead.
I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least
I can say how night-long I have lain under the stars and
Heard mountains moan in their sleep. By daylight,
They remember nothing, and go about their lawful occasions
Of not going anywhere except in slow disintegration. At night
They remember, however, that there is something they cannot remember.
So moan. Theirs is the perfected pain of conscience that
Of forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it. I have.
I do not recall what had burdened my tongue, but urge you
To think on the slug's white belly, how sick-slick and soft,
On the hairiness of stars, silver, silver, while the silence
Blows like wind by, and on the sea's virgin bosom unveiled
To give suck to the wavering serpent of the moon; and,
In the distance, in plaza, piazza, place, platz, and square,
Boot heels, like history being born, on cobbles bang.
Everything seems an echo of something else.
And when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head
Of Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving,
But without sound. The lips,
They were trying to say something very important.
But I had forgotten to mention an upland
Of wind-tortured stone white in darkness, and tall, but when
No wind, mist gathers, and once on the Sarré at midnight,
I watched the sheep huddling. Their eyes
Stared into nothingness. In that mist-diffused light their eyes
Were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water,
Or of a scholar who has lost faith in his calling.
Their jaws did not move. Shreds
Of dry grass, gray in the gray mist-light, hung
From the side of a jaw, unmoving.
You would think that nothing would ever again happen.
That may be a way to love God.
From New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 by Robert Penn Warren, published by Random House. Copyright © 1985 by Robert Penn Warren. Used by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author.
Mortal Limit
by Robert Penn Warren
I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.
It rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags
Of mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming
Of dream-spectral light above the lazy purity of snow-snags.
There--west--were the Tetons. Snow-peaks would soon be
In dark profile to break constellations. Beyond what height
Hangs now the black speck? Beyond what range will gold eyes see
New ranges rise to mark a last scrawl of light?
Or, having tasted that atmosphere's thinness, does it
Hang motionless in dying vision before
It knows it will accept the mortal limit,
And swing into the great circular downwardness that will restore
The breath of earth? Of rock? Of rot? Of other such
Items, and the darkness of whatever dream we clutch?
From New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 by Robert Penn Warren, published by Random House. Copyright © 1985 by Robert Penn Warren. Used by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author.
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