Yeats looked into the past and prophesied the future and dreamed a unifiedIrish society that could then resist English oppression. He adopted the language ofthe oppressor to manufacture or invent a cultural space, and used that cultural spaceto find a voice with which to critique the oppressive culture. He used his literaryworks, like "The Hawk," to set free his colonized homeland. Also new literaryforms of expression came to be known as modernism in literature and included theexpression of such feelings as discontinuity, ambiguity, and fragmentation. This wasthe world milieu in which Yeats wrote. And he saw how to use words as weaponsturned against the colonizer and how to use words to discover Ireland. At the sametime that he was implicated in Anglo-Irish colonialism, he also developed a systemof symbols that he believed explained cycles of history and would transcendcontemporary quarrels.
Yeats also persistently used and interacted with Irish political and historicalleaders. He names many of the political figures in much of his writing and useshistorical events as subjects. Not only does his writing overtly interact withhistorical figures; in at least some of his poetry, Yeats makes subtle allusions toIrish leaders of the past. "The Hawk" may be a poem about a real individual, butone who is never named at all; this poem provides an example of art that, uponcloser inspection, serves politics. The poem not only shows the political relationshipbetween the Fenians and the English government, but it also introduces an elementof the mystical; as Yeats uses the hawk as a symbol of the Fenian resistance in thepoem to illuminate the political situation. He makes the Hawk of the Fenianmovement into the hawk of the poem, he certainly presents the reader with astriking parallel; and he binds together history, politics, culture, spirituality, andpoetry into the configuration of his famous interpenetrating gyres.