"Hurt Hawks" shows great admiration and sympathy for the hawk as a strong wild creature who never yields even in misery to his baser instincts, will not be drawn to self-pity or dependency on others, will not suffer humiliation even when wounded, but will face pain and death without flinching. Jeffers sees the hawk, "intemperate and savage," as closer in spirit to what he calls "the wild God of the world" than are the "communal people," who band together in fear for self-protection. The speaker of the poem is a hunter with a rifle, who admits quite openly that l’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk," displaying both contempt for man and admiration for a bird of prey. Jeffers's inhumanism in this poem would seem unbearable except that he does not simply condemn man but celebrates natural beauty and wildness, showing a compassion for the hawk that leads him to give it "the lead gift in the twilight," an ironic but fitting death for the proud creature who will never surrender "the old implacable arrogance" and who attains a natural immortality in death, for Jeffers goes beyond naturalism to supernaturalism at the end, portraying the hawk’s soul soaring into the air and causing other birds to cry out at its passing. The ironic inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers is a western attitude, one that sorts well with the rugged wilderness of the California coast and places him as an individual poet at the extreme end of Western civilization.