J: Kathleen Jamie

Hawk and Shadow

Kathleen Jamie is one of the UK’s great nature writers of both poetry and prose. I have a couple of her poetry collections and I’ve seen her read her work live, where she’s extremely erudite and interesting on the process of writing creatively about nature. For this essay, I read back through her collection The Overhaul, which I bought when it came out about 10 years ago, and I loved returning to it. I think it’s Romantic at its heart, but not in a way that tries to freeze or preserve the past, in a way that engages with a modern view of Romanticism’s core ideas about the power and awe to be found in nature and about how the lyric form can be a vehicle for understanding both the self and the world. There are all sorts of threads through the collection, and I love it when lyric poets do that – there’s lots of speaking directly to animals, plants and objects, and the moon keeps intruding throughout the poems, almost like an annoying old friend. When I re-read this it made me wonder why Kathleen Jamie isn’t one of those handful of writers I’ve tried to be a completionist of. Maybe I’ll start now.

Lots of Jamie’s work is available online, and you can find today’s choice, which is from that collection The Overhaul, here: Hawk and Shadow - Poetry Archive

Hawk and Shadow

I watched a hawk
glide low across the hill,
her own dark shape
in her talons like a kill.

A straightforward title and a straightforward image here. We’re being invited by the speaker of the poem to observe the flight of this hawk and visualise the hawk’s shadow cast on the hill as something carried underneath it like prey. This image is being presented to us in a way that seems to prioritise simplicity and tradition. It’s not quite written in ballad meter but in terms of the way it looks on the page, the simple language that it uses, the full rhyme of the second and fourth lines, the way it deploys that lyric ‘I’ as an observer of nature, it feels as though it could conceivably have been written at any point in the last three hundred years.

It's really easy to do this badly and really hard to do it well – making the syntax work and not become mangled for the sake of the meter, making the rhymes true but not trite, keeping the focus sharply enough on the image while also fitting the words into the tight restrictive form you’ve set yourself. The form is patterned beautifully here – you’ve got an iambic dimeter being set up in the first line – da DUM, da DUM – and then repeated again in the third, while the second and fourth are trimeter. So it’s like a ballad in that it has the same sort of patterning, but not exactly, because the lines are shorter than normal. And then the last line introduces a break in the rhythmical pattern and moves from iambic to loosely anapaestic – da da DUM da, da da DUM. Plus I also like that even within this very small format, you’ve got the lack of end-rhyme in lines one and three but there’s still a chime within them with ‘hawk’ and ‘dark’.

Lastly, let’s look at the connotation of the image and where this may be going beyond just the observation of the hawk flying. The speaker isn’t just reporting the image neutrally, the speaker is remaking the image of the hawk’s closeness to its shadow to figure the hawk’s own shadow becoming its prey. So there’s something here about duality – the hawk is split into two, and one part of the hawk is preying upon the other. The hawk is preying upon its shadow self. There’s a comment on the nature of predation here, maybe, that’s similar to the Ted Hughes ‘Pike’ poem, where the hunting instinct is impressive but potentially self-sabotaging or self-harming.

She tilted her wings,
fell into the air –
the shadow coursed on
without her, like a hare.

“Fell into the air” is an interesting framing. This second stanza is a typically Romantic image where we notice the bird’s instinctual control and prowess, but that’s slightly undermined by the weird upside-down-ness of ‘falling’ ‘into the air’. The bird has lost some of that control perhaps, and the law of gravity is kind of being suspended or undermined by the speaker’s way of looking. If the shadow was tethered to the bird as prey in the first stanza, now it remains prey – ‘like a hare’ – but gains some agency as it almost escapes the hawk’s talons and ‘coursed on’ which is a verb denoting the same sort of prowess and control as the ‘tilted’ wings of the actual hawk.

Being out of sorts
with my so-called soul,
part unhooked hawk,
part shadow on parole,

So here the symbolism that was hinted at earlier is now being stated outright, and in that lyric tradition we go back to the speaker’s inner life for insight into how this observation of the outer world relates to the speaker’s ‘soul’ or emotion. The simple image of the way the bird’s shadow has happened to be cast on the hillside as visually parting from the hawk has become a symbol for the speaker’s ‘soul’, and not only that, but it’s a symbol of something being wrong, or ‘out of sorts’ with that soul. The image of hawk and shadow is not a symbol of the speaker’s body and soul, I don’t think – it’s an image of a divided soul.

What does it mean to reflect upon your own soul and to see it as ‘part unhooked hawk/part shadow on parole’. The unhooked hawk part seems to be an image both of freedom but also possibly loss of control. But the shadow ‘on parole’ – on parole from what? From God? Death? My sense is that it’s a reference to mortality, the ‘on parole’ image is a kind of memento mori reminding us that life is short. I could be wrong there. Either way, I think there’s a kind of Blakean contrary powering this stanza, and the image is built around the idea that in order to be as free as an unhooked hawk it’s necessary to also acknowledge the part of you that is not free?

I also really like ‘so-called soul’, which I think speaks to the thing I said in the introduction about how when Jamie’s work uses traditional forms and approaches, that’s not to say there isn’t a more modern sensibility. It’s almost as though the speaker is acknowledging there that to write poetry and to talk about the soul without irony is perhaps unfashionable in the modern world? ‘So-called’ might be undermining anything else we want to do with that image of the shadow that is central to the whole poem, but it does give everything a nice sense of uncertainty and a picture of a mind that is working through. Is the soul ‘so-called’ because the speaker has religious doubts about the existence of a soul at all? Or is it ‘so-called’ in a contemptuous way – my soul is really nothing to write home about, or dysfunctional in some way?

I played fast and loose:
keeping one in sight
while forsaking the other.
The hawk gained height:

her mate on the ground
began to fade,
the hill and sky were empty,
and I was afraid.

It’s a lovely touch to not quite specify which way the speaker goes when the hawk separates from its shadow – ‘keeping one in sight/while forsaking the other’. Is she following the unhooked hawk or the shadow on parole? I’m also interested in ‘forsaking’, which is one of the few polysyllabic words in the whole poem, and definitely for me has real old-fashioned Biblical connotations – so perhaps the ‘so-called’ in the earlier stanza was just a bit of nonchalance – this really is a poem about the soul!

Another really nice touch is how the shadow is no longer the hawk’s prey but her ‘mate’ – since the speaker’s self-reflection, that relationship between the two sides of the bird has altered and become closer. I like the ambiguity of ‘mate’, which obviously since it applies to an animal could mean partner, but could also be a more informal, slangy ‘friend’.

This last line is a belter. I do really enjoy an unexpected gut-punch last line in a poem, something that gives you an intellectual or emotional swerve, and without coming from nowhere, still confuses everything you thought you understood. “I was afraid.” Why?!

I don’t get the sense that the speaker is afraid for the hawk, obviously. They’re afraid for themselves. The poem has established that the hawk and its shadow was a symbol for the speaker’s divided soul. And the speaker has just watched the hawk part so far from its shadow that both have now disappeared, leaving only emptiness. So is the speaker ‘afraid’ because what they’ve just seen is proof that the duality they feel is irreconcilable? Something has happened to split this speaker’s soul apart and it cannot be fixed, which erases both halves? Or is this an image of the speaker surrendering to a kind of atheistic nihilism – an acknowledgement that if you were to go looking for a soul, you would end up finding only conflict and emptiness?

Here’s the link to the poem again: Hawk and Shadow - Poetry Archive

In the comments:

Why is the speaker afraid?