Inspired by a great maimed red tail hawk he and others had fed for six weeks—a hawk that yet craved the freedom to walk into the sunset asking for death—Jeffers intensifies the theme of wildness in his verse, his apparent belief in or yearning for a unifying God, not a God of Man and his petty things, but of Time and the Universe, a God closer to wild animals and trees and sentinel mountains than to any of Man’s notions.
This acute verse of 27 lines is at its most gripping in the following 3 lines, midway through the poem:
“The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him…”
James, have you visited a slaughter pen, animals awaiting a bolt gun, feed, they normally would not consume in the wild, men shooting time after time, slaughter on a Industrial scale, or animals preyed upon by hunters, and they call me uncivilized, for my beliefs, I hope I can face my end as the hawk!