Robert Penn Warren's Evening Hawk

In “Evening Hawk,” Robert Penn Warren sets an eerie scene of a God-like hawk flying through day and night while silently judging human error and the concept of time. Through Warren’s grim diction contrasting the narrator’s awe filled tone, Warren shows a unique perspective of death paired with religious allusions and death imagery to illustrate the need for religious guidance due to human error and sin. Warren starts the poem with the God-like hawk high in the sky, symbolizing heaven, but, through the poem’s shift to the dark cellar, Warren alludes to religion and the fate of mankind descending to hell without religious guidance. Warren begins the poem with focus towards the sky and the height of the hawk flying “above [the] pines.” But throughout the poem, the hawk descends slowly as Warren guides the audience’s perspective lower and lower also controlling …show more content…
The fall of the “head of each stalk” of time is key due to the head being higher up in location symbolizing heaven as well as the thorny crown placed upon Jesus’s head during his death and the head of the church representing Christ and his body. The “crashless fall” implies the stalks never fall to the ground and are in a constant state of falling similar to the way sin is always being forgiven and the cycle of life always continuing and persisting. Warren then has the hawk “climbing” the “last light” showing the scene darkening and the hawk returning to the skies until the end of the poem in the last stanza when the narrator questions what would happen if there “were no wind” for the hawk. With that question, Warren answers with grim, dark imagery of a “drip in darkness” in the “cellar.” The drip in the darkness implies complete darkness with no light whatsoever, symbolizing the lack of religious guidance, while the cellar symbolizes hell due to