"Raptor": The Introduction

The speaker says that he finally encounters a Goshawk at "the Center" of the forest. This line reminds me of a riddle- "How far can you travel into a forest? Halfway, because if you go any farther you're leaving." Maybe this relates to the reason that the speaker is not able to completely scratch the Goshawk of his list, he can only understand "half" the bird, the half he has in common as a fellow animal. Perhaps this is why in the second stanza the Goshawk "refutes" his stare rather than returning it. In my research of the Goshawk, I found that it was not actually considered "endangered," although attempts have been made to classify it as such because of the rapid destruction of Goshawk habitats. This complicates our understanding of the use "now Rare" in the poem. The final stanza of the poem seems to be a warning to readers about misunderstanding the relationship between humans and nature. Trying to "tame" the bird will eventually lead to its destruction- "what can be tamer than extinct?" Poetry as a form of expression is in a similar situation as the bird. That is, a poem can never be fully understood and to suggest that it has been fully interpreted or fully "tamed" is to remove its artistic value. Although we have not read the collection in it's entirety, it is interesting to think about how this poem operates as an introduction to the text as a whole. It seems that the subject of this poem is not the Raptor itself, but rather the "experience" of a Raptor. This can be interpreted as a cue to the reader to focus on the experience of the poem rather than it's exact meaning.