Give Your Heart to the Hawks

Give Your Heart to the Hawks, free‐verse narrative by Jeffers, the title poem of a volume published in 1933.

At a drunken beach party near their California home, Lance Fraser discovers his brother Michael and his wife Fayne in an embrace, and kills his brother. No one else has seen the incident, and Fayne, independent of ordinary moral standards, persuades her husband to conceal his crime, making it appear an accident. (“Oh, give your heart to the hawks for a snack o' meat But not to men.”) Conscience‐stricken, Lance torments himself by sleeping in Michael's room, seducing Michael's fiancée, Mary Abbey, and making love to Fayne on Michael's grave. Mary confesses to Fayne that she is pregnant, goes to San Francisco for an abortion, and later commits suicide. Fayne, herself pregnant, tries desperately to keep Lance from surrendering to police, but he is morbidly obsessed, and confesses to his puritanical old father, who becomes insane. Fayne packs their belongings and persuades her husband to leave the farm with her. At their first camp, on a trail near the coast, he becomes insane, kills their horses with an axe, and leaps from a cliff to his death. Fayne buries him on the beach and returns, her courage and faith unwavering. (“I could not keep you, but your child in my body Will change the world.”)