Hurt Hawks Setting

Where It All Goes Down

You get the feeling that this poem is set roughly between the wilds and human civilization, where someone walking about town might discover an injured animal, but close enough to the wide open spaces where that animal once roamed free. That fits the topic perfectly: the poem is the intersection of human and animal. And although there are mentions of flight or sky, this poem—like the two injured hawks—is very much earthbound. One hawk lurks under an oak-bush (6). The other wanders "the foreland hill" (23) near a "flooded river" (27).

The time span differs from section to section. In the first, we hear that it's been a week. In the second stanza, the speaker says that he's been tending to the hurt hawk for six weeks before he admits defeat and mercifully kills the bird. It's interesting to see that in both sections, the speaker specifies the duration of each bird's suffering. By that, he also implies the duration of the speaker's own involvement with each bird. He's feeling it with them.