The Sunset Hawk

...This sunset hawk, first seen in boyhood, keeps returning in Warren's poems...

...The strongest poem in an extraordinary book, "The Leaf" stations its poet "near the nesting place of the hawk," and then grants him an absolute vision: "I saw...

...look...

...The emphasis is upon the immanent thrust of the natural object, rather than its transcendent possibihties...

...Section VI, "Watershed," of "Kentucky Mountain Farm" in that initial collection has a memorable image: "The sunset hawk now rides The tall light up the climbing deep of air...

...The second poem in these Selected Poems is "Evening Hawk," written in 1975...

...Of distance unspoiled and bright space spilled...

...The last poem in Warren's best volume, Or Else—Poem Poems 1968-1974, ends with a different kind of hawk's vision, as a figuration for the poet's new style: "The hawk, . . . glides, In the pellucid ease of thought and at His breathless angle, Down...

...The hawk shudder in the high sky, he shudders To hold position in the blazing wind, in relation to The firmament, he shudders and the world is a metaphor . . ." Warren's equal shudder is into a language finally his own, rather than Eliot's—away from...

...With preternatural persistence and unsurpassed energy of invention, Warren has made himself one with his own astonishing vision of the bird: His wing Sycthes down another day, his motion Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time...

...Look...

...The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error...

...author, "Poetry and Repression," "Figures of Capable Imagination" The final section of Song of Myself begins with Walt Whitman in juxtaposition to the spotted hawk who swoops by and accuses the poet, complaining "of my gab and my loitering...

...In Tale of Time: Poems 1960-1966, he explicitly compares "hawk shadow" with "that fugitive thought which I can find no word for," the consummate poetry upon whose threshold he stands at last...

...Whatever the cause of his silence in verse, it seems significant that Promises: Poems 1954-1956 opens with an address to the poet's infant daughter that culminates in a return of the hawk image...

...I read Warren's poetry with a shudder that is at once spiritual revulsion and total esthetic satisfaction, for he has done for the School of Eliot what Eliot could not do: He has invented a poetry that fights free even of its own ideological ferocity by way of a sublime energy of language...

...While men sleep, the hawk flies on in the night, scanning a landscape of disappearances with "gold eyes" that make all shrivelings reappear...

...my tongue Was like a dry leaf in my mouth" and toward a precursor-overcoming sense that: "The world Is fruitful, and I, too, In that I am the father Of my father's father's father...

...There are similitudes between Whitman and the hawk—both are untamed, untranslatable and sound their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world—but there is certainly no identification...

...All the King's Men and World Enough and Time...

...Henceforward, in a great decade of poetry, Warren celebrates his being blessed by a new voice "for the only Gift I have given: teeth set on edge...

...Warren goes on forgiving God, and himself, nothing, and implies that this is the only way to love either God or the self...

...Perhaps it was the absence of such emblems in his confrontation of reality that stopped Warren's poetry in the decade 1943-1953, when he wrote his most ambitious novels...

...Warren continues to be too harsh on his earliest book, Thirty-six Poems (1935), underrepresented in all his selected volumes...

...In the vision of Robert Penn Warren, a vision overtly anti-Emersonian, something sublimely repressed in and by the poet longs to be what Wallace Stevens once termed "a hawk of life...

...That threshold is crossed in Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968, where Warren consciously takes on his full power over language and the world of the senses...

...As he turned 60, Warren turned also into his true power as a poet, so that now, at 71, he alone among living writers ranks with the foremost American poets of the century: Frost, Stevens, Hart Crane, Williams, Pound, Eliot...

...At 38,000 feet Emerson Is dead right," Warren had snapped in his earlier "Homage to Emerson, on Night Right to New York...

...One can believe that Emerson, grounded, is still dead right, as I do, and continue to feel the force of Warren's argument with his strongest antagonist...

...To an Emersonian like Whitman (Emersonian in the broad sense, there being no other sense with so proudly self-contradictory a master), the hawk is firmly part of Nature, of the Not-Me...

...Yet his indisputable greatness, his oanonical strength, is demonstrated only by the work of the last decade—Incarnations, Audubon: A Vision, Or Else, and the 10 poems written in 1975 that open this new volume of Selected Poems...

...Reading through this collection, arranged in reverse chronology, one discovers Warren is that rarest kind of major poet: He has never stopped developing from his origins up to his work-in-progress...

...Viewing the isolated spot he has brought her to, Warren celebrates "the hawk-hung delight...

...After 40 years, it completes "Watershed's" image of the "sunset hawk...

...I, Of my father, have set the teeth on edge...

...Stevens said he wanted his poems "To meet that hawk's eye and to flinch Not at the eye but at the joy of it"—still a Whitmanian ambition...

...This prophetic trope governs the long poem Audubon: A Vision, where the painter who wrote ". . . in my sleep I continually dream of birds" becomes the surrogate for the boy, Warren, whose poetic incarnation came about as he stood in the dark, and heard "the great geese hoot northward...

...Warren is as embedded in what he takes to be a hawk's Nature as he is in time and history, and his poems merge part of their joy with the hawk's state of being...

...he is climbing the last light Who knows neither Time nor error, and under Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings Into shadow...

...To trace that merging is to start to appreciate Warren's supreme achievement in a lifetime's poetry...

...As the hawk breaks speed and hovers, he "makes contact," giving us a trope that stands, part for whole, for the tense power of Warren's mature art: "The hawk perches on the topmost, indicative tip of The bough's sharp black and skinny jag skyward...

...Warren always was a strikingly good poet, as a reading of his Selected Poems: New And Old 1923196b revealed to many critics and lovers of American verse...

...In the still relatively early "To A Friend Parting," the inadequacy of "the said, the unsaid" is juxtaposed to seeing: "The hawk tower, his wings the light take," an emblem of certainty in pride and honor...

...Emerson, says Warren's poem, "had forgiven God everything," which is merely to say that Emerson had begun a truly American vision sensibly, by forgiving himself everything (something Nietzsche could not quite do...