Evening Hawk

“Evening Hawk” is one of American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren’s most famous poems. This lyric poem was first published in The Atlantic in 1975, then later collected that same year into Warren’s collection Can I See Arcturus From Where I Stand? It also appeared in Selected Poems (1976) and New and Selected Poems (1985).

The poem centers on the speaker’s observation of the flight of a hawk at sunset. As is typical in Warren’s poetry, the hawk serves as a metaphor to broach metaphysical topics, including life’s purpose. Throughout his long career, which began in 1921 and lasted until his death, Warren commonly used nature imagery to discuss more philosophical concerns.

Considered one of the preeminent writers of the United States, Warren’s work was much lauded both during his lifetime and since. He earned the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice (in 1958 and 1979) as well as for Fiction for his novel All the King’s Men (1947). He is the only writer to have one in both categories. “Evening Hawk” is one of the poet’s later poems and is widely anthologized as one of the best in his career.

Poet Biography

Robert Penn Warren was born in 1905 to Robert and Anna Warren in the town of Guthrie, Kentucky. The family supported Warren, his sister, and his brother’s interest in literature, and Warren noted his childhood was happy. Growing up, he hoped for a career in the Navy, but an accident with his brother caused the loss of his eye in 1921. This required the cancellation of his appointment to the United States Naval Academy. In the fall of that year, at the age of 16, Warren enrolled instead at Vanderbilt University as a chemical engineer.

Warren, who was nicknamed “Red” by his classmates, soon discovered that he preferred his English classes and the company of the teachers and students in that department. He switched majors and was befriended by poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson, among others. From 1922 to 1925, they published a magazine called The Fugitive, which was influential, and they became known as the Fugitive Poets.

Some members of this group, including Warren, participated in another group called the Southern Agrarians, who supported political views that aligned with the anti-segregation movement of the time. The group published a volume of essays called I’ll Take My Stand (1930), to which Warren contributed. By the 1950s, however, Warren recanted these views, as he grew to support more progressive ideas and racial integration.

In 1925, Warren graduated from Vanderbilt and entered University of California, Berkeley for study of a master’s degree in English, which he received in 1927. The following fall, he began studying at Yale, then received a Rhodes Scholarship in 1928 to study in London at Oxford University. During that time, he met fellow Oxford student and former Vanderbilt alum, Cleanth Brooks. The two became close friends and later wrote several textbooks. In 1929, Warren published his first book, a biography of abolitionist John Brown.

In 1930, Warren graduated and returned to the United States to teach at Southwestern College in Memphis, Tennessee. He married Emma “Cinina” Brescia, whom he met in 1925. The marriage, which was by all accounts unhappy and volatile, produced no children. From 1931 to 1934, Warren taught at Vanderbilt, where he wrote two novels rejected by publishers.

In 1934, he began teaching at Louisiana State University (LSU), where Cleanth Brooks was a professor. The two, along with Charles W. Pipkin and Albert Erskine, founded The Southern Review, which went on to become one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the country. Warren’s first published collection of poetry—Thirty-Six Poems—came out the next year, and his first novel, Night Rider, appeared in 1939.

However, in 1942, due to the defunding of The Southern Review, Warren left LSU for the University of Minnesota. There, he completed All the King’s Men (1946), a novel which is probably Warren’s most well-known work. In 1947, it received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1949, it was made into a film and won the Oscar for Best Picture, making Warren a household name.

In 1950, he joined the faculty of Yale. In 1951, on the advice of her psychiatrist, Cinina Brescia Warren filed for divorce. Warren soon after met writer Eleanor Phelps Clark, whom he wed in 1952. They had two children with whom Warren was close, Rosanna Phelps Warren (born 1953) and Gabriel Penn Warren (born 1955). In 1957, Warren published Promises: Poems 1954-1956 and the following year won his second Pulitzer for that collection.

As an undergraduate, Warren had published an anti-integration article called “The Briar Patch,” which he recanted in 1956. For the remainder of his life, he became a supporter of racial integration and actively wrote about Southern History and the civil rights movement in a series of nonfiction titles, including Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956) and The Legacy of the Civil War (1961). In 1965, he published interviews with prominent Black civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin in Who Speaks for the Negro?  He received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale in 1967.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, Warren received several prominent national awards. In 1970, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature. Four years later, he was appointed Jefferson Lecturer from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the highest honor in the United States in the humanities. His poetry collection Now and Then won the Pulitzer in 1979. In 1980, he was given the highest civilian award in America, the National Medal of Freedom. He received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1981, the Robert Frost Medal in 1985, and was named the first United States Poet Laureate in 1986. The following year, he received the National Medal of the Arts.

Robert Penn Warren died on September 15, 1989, at the age of 84, in his home in Vermont, leaving a legacy of 10 novels, 16 volumes of poetry, a volume of short stories, and several significant textbooks and critical studies. He is buried in Vermont but has a marker in Guthrie, Kentucky’s cemetery.

Poem Text

Warren, Robert Penn. “Evening Hawk.” 1975. Poets.org.

Summary

The speaker observes a hawk at evening time as it flies through “plane[s] of light” (Line 1) cast by the setting sun. A mountain and its surrounding pine trees are silhouetted against the purple backdrop of the sky. The speaker notes the sharp angle of the bird’s movement, comparing the action to a blade cutting down the “stalks of Time” (Line 10), like harvesting grain. The passage of time, they note, is informed by human misunderstanding.

The speaker directs the reader to look at the hawk again. It is a creature that doesn’t worry about the passage of time or human mistakes as it cuts through a landscape that disappears in shadow. The speaker notes that other birds have also grown quiet, and only the bat flies in the night sky. They suggest that the bat is also a timeless creature.

The speaker observes a star fixed over the mountain’s peak and compares it to the Greek philosopher Plato. They end the poem suggesting that if the air were quiet, the planet’s rotation could be heard, and that human history would sound like drops of water from a broken “pipe in the cellar” (Line 23).