Evening Hawk

“Picnic Remembered” by Robert Penn Warren (1942)

This poem appeared in Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, Warren’s second book. It contains seven stanzas of seven lines and employs a rhyme scheme. The speaker of the poem remembers a pleasant picnic. Under the “amber light” (Line 9), the couple seems to have “our perfections stilled and framed / to mock Time’s marveling after-spies” (Lines 13-14). However, the speaker soon sees this golden day to have been an illusion and subsumed by shadow. They find that “we did not know / How darkness darker staired below” (Lines 19-20). Now, “our clearest souls / [A]re sped” (Lines 37-38).

Like “Evening Hawk,” a hawk appears in this poem to stand in for the “soul” (Line 44), which has “fled / [o]n glimmering wings past vision’s path” (Lines 44-45). Again, the hawk is a messenger, and the poem addresses similar bifurcations of lightness and shadow that Warren would imagistically use again 33 years later.

“A Way to Love God” by Robert Penn Warren (1975)

This poem first appeared directly before “Evening Hawk” in the collection Can I See Arcturus From Where I Stand? (1975). “A Way to Love God” discusses how the speaker lies awake knowing the “perfected pain of conscience” (Line 12) due to “something they cannot remember” (Line 11), which has “burdened [their] tongue” (Line 14).