"Evening Hawk" Examined: Matters of Time and Thematics Mackenzie Rose Miller 11th Grade

“Evening Hawk” by Robert Penn Warren is, despite its name, not about a hawk. It is about time, the ineffable qualities of that which is past, and the ways in which light and darkness relate with time. And skirting above all of this flies the hawk, a vessel that Warren uses to carry his message throughout the poem.

The poem opens in its first stanza with a description of action. We dive into the beginning by seeing wings “dipping through” from “plane of light to plane” (1). Immediately, the word “plane” conjures up both planes of land as well as planes that fly through the sky. Despite the fact that the word most likely means planes of space/area, the heavy influence of flight and air in the first line already uses the double meaning of the word to influence the reader’s perception to drift towards that of airy flight. “Wings dipping through / geometries and orchids” This first line break occurs immediately after Warren writes of wings dipping through, and in a way, forces our eyes to literally dip through the words to find the next line. After he describes all of these lively actions, he ends the first stanza by writing “the hawk comes.” We see the way the hawk flies, the way its wings dip through the sky, the landscape it...