Compare And Contrast Mushrooms By Sylvia Plath And Hawk Roosting By Ted Hughes
Compare and Contrast Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath and Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes
Both of these poems have a central theme of nature. However, the real meaning of each poem can be found elsewhere. In the case of Mushrooms, there is a strong sense of a metaphor underneath the surface about the struggle for women’s rights and Plath plays up to this by describing the mushrooms as insidious beings. Hawk Roosting on the other hand, implies a metaphor for the arrogant, selfish megalomaniacs of today’s world and Hughes achieves this by expressing the sentiments of a hawk through the hawk’s perspective but in the terms of a human.
Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes is a poem of two levels. On the surface, it portrays an actual hawk on the top of a tree, surveying his kingdom, and talking about the rest of the world in his own perspective, albeit an egotistical one. The hawk seems proud of its self-proclaimed superiority, as it announces its capacity to dole out death, its power, efficiency and ruthlessness. By using the first person to enter the consciousness of a hawk, Hughes shows us the solipsistic views expressed by the hawk in human terms and concepts which remind us of the narcissistic pursuits in the modern world and imply a metaphor for mankind. The poem is all about the need for control inherent in human beings. Hughes allegorically uses the Hawk to describe dictatorship, what Hughes believes to be the epitome of human desire for control, we see vanity (“it is all mine”) and we see delusion, ironically alluded to in "falsifying dream". From this perspective it is an evaluation on the unfounded superiority that human beings assert.
The hawk itself represents power and ignorance at the same time because he thinks that he is the most important animal in the woods and he is ignorant to the fact that he cannot have everything, in the poem Hughes shows this very well by using lots of emotive language and description about how the hawk thinks.
The opening line, “I...
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