The Goshawk

The Goshawk is T. H. White’s account of training Gos, a goshawk, in which falconry becomes an intimate but increasingly painful test of attention, patience, and control. Helen Macdonald reads the book both as a record of a falconer’s failures and as a work of imaginative longing: White seeks a relationship with a bird who remains other than human, while Macdonald recognizes how easily that longing can reshape the animal into a figure for human needs.

The Book and Its Falconry

In Macdonald’s account, White’s book gives unusual literary weight to the solitary work of an austringer, a trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks. The distinction matters because falconry was also marked by access to land and class. Hunting with falcons properly required large open spaces, often available chiefly to wealthy or well-connected people; goshawks could be flown in more confined settings. Older writing consequently associated falconry’s noble falcons with aristocratic privilege and treated the solitary goshawk trainer as an inferior, awkward outsider. The book’s choice of Gos places White within that less celebrated tradition.

That tradition came with a vocabulary of suspicion. Later falconry books described goshawks as moody, difficult, and disagreeable, qualities often attributed to the bird rather than to the trainer’s methods. Macdonald sets those judgments against earlier accounts in which goshawks are shy but sociable, and respond to considerate treatment. In that contrast, The Goshawk is more than a practical narrative about training: it invites scrutiny of the assumptions that make a bird seem naturally unmanageable, and of the human conduct those assumptions can excuse.

Training Gos: Patience and Failure

One of the book’s formative scenes concerns White’s first attempt to call Gos to him. He has fashioned a creance from doubled tarred twine, which is liable to snap, and believes he has identified the simple principle of training: a hungry hawk will fly to him, while a bird that is not hungry will not. The scene establishes his eagerness to turn observation into a reliable method. Yet his confidence exceeds his understanding of what the bird’s responses mean.

Macdonald contrasts White’s attempt with the calling-off lessons she uses with Mabel. In those lessons, an immediate response to the raised glove and whistle is the aim; if the hawk does not come promptly, the session ends and can be tried again later. White, by contrast, waits and calls at length, mishandles the creance, and fails to make the food’s arrival intelligible as a reward. Most tellingly, when Gos finally begins to approach, White runs away. Macdonald identifies that reversal as the episode’s central failure: the trainer’s fear interrupts the very trust he is trying to establish.

White returns to the task two days later, calling from forty yards away with butcher’s steak. He tries a succession of tones, from command to pleading, while Gos remains on the railings for ten minutes before flying. As the bird approaches, White’s earlier fear takes over again; he ducks, and Gos veers into branches and drops into a hedge. The episode is not simply a lesson in technique. It shows how bodily fear and uncertain judgment can undo the patience that training requires, and foreshadows the increasingly strained relation between the two.

Chapel Green and the Longing for the Past

Macdonald’s favourite passage in The Goshawk is White’s visit with Gos to Chapel Green. White walks five fields with the hawk and stands among the remains of a ruined chapel, imagining the buried people beneath the ground greeting the return of a goshawk. The place allows him to picture a community from an earlier time, one for whom the bird would have been familiar and intelligible. His imagined closeness to those vanished lives makes the scene a communion with a past that modernity has obscured.

As a child, Macdonald could picture the chapel and felt a kinship with White through this passage, though she did not understand one of his agricultural references. Later, the scene becomes entangled with her own bereavement. She remembers a telescope borrowed from her father and never returned, and the promise that there would be another opportunity to give it back. On a train journey with her mother and brother, she realizes that she will never see her father again. In retrospect, White’s imagined recovery of a lost community and her own irretrievable loss occupy the same emotional landscape: both make the wish for a next time painfully visible.

Gos, White, and the Book’s Emotional Reading

The book’s account of Gos also carries a psychological charge that Macdonald connects to White’s life. She recounts White’s later description of loving the unteachable and the untouchable, and his ability to use the hawk as a means of imagining different selves: parent, child, teacher, and pupil. In White’s notes, the bond is figured as an inward connection between bird and man. Macdonald proposes that The Goshawk can be read as a work of suppressed homosexual desire, not a claim about physical intimacy but a search for kinship by a lonely man who felt himself different. Falconry, in this reading, offers fellowship with other men whose attachment to hawks is difficult for outsiders to understand.

This interpretation does not cancel the book’s falconry narrative; it explains some of the intensity White invests in it. Macdonald describes his relationship with Gos as a struggle that lasts six weeks and becomes bound up with his sense of self and future. White fears that the hawk’s death would mean the death of much of his present identity. But devotion does not make the relationship equal or successful. His neglect allows Gos to become wild again, and the bird’s resistance comes to represent a limit White cannot overcome. The story’s emotional force lies partly in that gap between the kinship White longs for and the control his training repeatedly fails to achieve.

Macdonald’s Re-reading of the Wild

Macdonald’s own experiences with Mabel clarify both the book’s insight and its danger. While training her, she attends closely to minute changes in posture and feathers, learning to anticipate what the hawk may do. That close observation can feel like entering the animal’s perspective, yet it also tempts the observer to confuse imaginative identification with actual knowledge. The Goshawk becomes a crucial point of comparison: its scenes can illuminate human grief and desire, but Gos is not reducible to what White needs him to mean.

The distinction is sharpened when Macdonald considers her own hawk’s play, independence, and capacity to surprise her. Goshawks had often been described as sullen or unplayful, but Mabel’s games with paper challenge those fixed descriptions. Macdonald recognizes that a human idea of the goshawk may conceal the bird’s own varied behavior. Later, as her grief eases, she understands that Mabel’s world and her own are not the same. The distance between them is not a failure of affection; it makes a more honest coexistence possible.

In her final reflection on White’s book, Macdonald resists turning Mabel into a human emblem, a historical character, or a misremembered villain. The Goshawk remains valuable precisely because it exposes the power and risk of such transformations. A goshawk’s wildness may be made meaningful to people, but it is not created by those meanings. Macdonald’s reading preserves the book’s tragic intimacy while insisting on the bird’s independence: the animal can connect human beings to longing and loss without becoming merely an instrument of either.