Hawk Roosting and Golden Retrievals
“Hawk Roosting” and “Golden Retrievals” In the two poems Ted Hughes’s, “Hawk Roosting,” and Mark Doty’s, “Golden Retrievals”, the writers use tone and visual imagery to present the animals’ unique point of view in the poems. The tone of “Hawk Roosting” is powerful, sinister, and arrogant compared to the lighthearted, playful tone that is set in “Golden Retrievals.” The hawk’s monologue in “Hawk Roosting” shows how the Hawk sees the world with such power and a sense of ownership as he tells the reader that he “kills where [he pleases] because it is all [his]” (line 14), in difference the k-9 in “Golden Retrievals” who sees it in a playful and distracted manner. The egoistic narrator in “Hawk Roosting” is a hawk that uses imagery make the reader envision the world from his eyes. The reader can imagine the narrator’s “each feather/ hooked head and/ feet locked upon the rough bark” (4, 9, 11). The wording seen during the course of the poem “Hawk roosting” creates an image for the role that the Hawk thinks he plays in the world. The Hawk views the world from “the top of the wood” and as the Hawk is able to fly he “the earth's face [is] upward for [his] inspection” (8) showing his excellent view of his surroundings and how he views the world as his own. In “Golden Retrievals” the distracted narrator paints a picture in the reader’s mind of how many objects he encounters and allows the reader to imagine the dog constantly chasing after a new object on a daily basis. He “sniff[s] the wind, then/ [is] off again” (4-5) while the owner is “sunk in the past, half [their] walk,/ thinking of what [the owner] never can bring back” (7-8). In contrast to the Hawk, the Golden retriever is much more of a carefree character. The wording used in this poem is much more energetic than the diction seen in “Hawk Roosting.” The narrator speaks of things that remind the reader of dogs and their nature such as “Fetch, Balls and sticks, [Bunnies], a squirrel”. Hughes uses a dark tone