The Hawk
The Hawk - fact Summary
Included in the Tower
This short lyric appears in Yeats’s collection The Tower (1928). It stages a hawk as a figure of the mind resisting confinement, and a speaker who alternately envies and imitates that freedom. The poem's compact dialogue and image link individual pride and social performance, fitting concerns of Yeats's later verse about identity, artistic autonomy, and the tensions between wild impulse and civil constraint.
Read Complete Analyses'Call down the hawk from the air; Let him be hooded or caged Till the yellow eye has grown mild, For larder and spit are bare, The old cook enraged, The scullion gone wild.' 'I will not be clapped in a hood, Nor a cage, nor alight upon wrist, Now I have learnt to be proud Hovering over the wood In the broken mist Or tumbling cloud.' 'What tumbling cloud did you cleave, Yellow-eyed hawk of the mind, Last evening? that I, who had sat Dumbfounded before a knave, Should give to my friend A pretence of wit.'
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