Yeats looked into the past and prophesied the future and dreamed a unified Irish society that could then resist English oppression. He adopted the language of the oppressor to manufacture or invent a cultural space, and used that cultural space to find a voice with which to critique the oppressive culture. He used his literary works, like "The Hawk," to set free his colonized homeland. Also new literary forms of expression came to be known as modernism in literature and included the expression of such feelings as discontinuity, ambiguity, and fragmentation. This was the world milieu in which Yeats wrote. And he saw how to use words as weapons turned against the colonizer and how to use words to discover Ireland. At the same time that he was implicated in Anglo-Irish colonialism, he also developed a system of symbols that he believed explained cycles of history and would transcend contemporary quarrels. Yeats also persistently used and interacted with Irish political and historical leaders. He names many of the political figures in much of his writing and uses historical events as subjects. Not only does his writing overtly interact with historical figures; in at least some of his poetry, Yeats makes subtle allusions to Irish leaders of the past. "The Hawk" may be a poem about a real individual, but one who is never named at all; this poem provides an example of art that, upon closer inspection, serves politics. The poem not only shows the political relationship between the Fenians and the English government, but it also introduces an element of the mystical; as Yeats uses the hawk as a symbol of the Fenian resistance in the poem to illuminate the political situation. He makes the Hawk of the Fenian movement into the hawk of the poem, he certainly presents the reader with a striking parallel; and he binds together history, politics, culture, spirituality, and poetry into the configuration of his famous interpenetrating gyres.