H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

Language Features in the first paragraph

**Direct Speech**- immediate action

**Bureaucratic/ administrative language** (“Article 10s… official forms”)- story about grief yet it has an official tone- counter intuitive, dissonant.

**Proleptic phrase** (“Don’t want you going home with the wrong bird”)- foreshadowing, sets up suspicion. By the end of the article it seems the “wrong bird” is in fact the “right bird” for the writer

Structural Features in the first paragraph

**Begins** ***in medias res***- straight into the action, creates excitement

Language Features in the second paragraph

**Functional language** (“We noted the numbers- tied string”)

**Use of pronou****ns** (“We… us”)- bracket the paragraph (*parenthesis*) shows the opposition between human and animal (we/us vs hawk)

**Onomatopoeia/ italics** (“a sudden **thump**”)- violent and forceful which communicates the nature of the bird inside.

**Simile** (“as if someone had punched it”)- sense of foreboding and dread at what is inside the box

Language Features in the third paragraph

**Metaphor** (“Daylight irrigating the box”)- mixing water and light imagery creates a vivid description

**Repetition** (“thump… thump… enormous, enormous… miles and miles”)- emphasis

**Prosaic, literary line** (“The air turned- with dust”)- contrast with previous functional language

**Semantic field of chaos** (“battle… whirring, chaotic clatter… twittering… barred and beating”)

**Binary opposition** (“brilliance and fury”)

**Contradictory similes** (“scattered quills of fretful porpentine… like gold falling through water”)- aggressive and violent vs

**Metaphor** (“a conjuring trick”)- the bird is compared to a magical illusion- supernatural, frightening connotations

**Tricolon** (“A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon”)- the bird is impossible to comprehend. Suggest the bird is horrifying and powerful

Structural Features in the third paragraph

**Four short, incomplete sentences in first line**- change in pace following monotony in previous lines

**Profound shift in perspective to the Hawk in second part of paragraph**- Juxtaposition between limited view of humans and deeper richer perspective of the hawk. Writer uses more sophisticated language

**Long sentence starting with a conjunction** (“But now it is this; and she can see *everything*…”)- ibid. gives the birds point of view