The portrayal of freedom thus presented a formidable challenge. To capture its elusive and dialectical character, to make it comprehensible not only to his own but to a later time, Jeffers had to find a formulation independent of the vagaries of historical fortune. He did so by juxtaposing man's situational freedom as a moral agent in the world with the unconditioned freedom suggested by certain aspects of natural process. In Jeffers' poetry birds of prey, particularly the hawk and the eagle, came to serve as emblems of such unconditioned freedom. Jeffers did not of course imply that such predators were free in any supervenient sense. Rather, they symbolized the original ontological freedom to which man aspired but could never (as agent) return, thus providing both an imaginative fulfillment and a wry measure of human limitation. "Hurt Hawks," one of Jeffers' most admired poems, ably illustrates the complexities of this interaction. In it the poet, like Michal in "Cawdor," attempts to nurse a crippled hawk:

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,

He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening,

    asking for death,

 

The inherent falsity of the poet's position is summed up in the presumption of I gave him freedom: as if anyone could "give" freedom and as if -- of all donors and all recipients - a man could give freedom to a hawk. The poet finally understands his obligation and acts upon it. Yet something more is performed than a service, something more accomplished than mere reparation. The "gift" of instantaneous death is not that it is merciful but that it releases, at least in the poet's imagination, the "fierce rush" of the bird's essential freedom, abstracted from condition and circumstance. The recipient of this gift is of course the poet himself, who in this sense is "given" his freedom, or a privileged glimpse of it; but the bond of a true relationship is suggested in the poem's exalted close, the genuineness of an exchange.