Ted Hughes
Contemporary Literature in English
Natália Pikli
Department of English Studies
ELTE
Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
Edward James Hughes, Mytholmroyd,
Yorkshire – Poet Laureate 1984-89
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – (1956-1963)
(Birthday Letters, 1989)
• Yorkshire country childhood –
nature and myth, memories of war
and masculinity
• Cambridge: literature →
anthropology, archeology
• St. Botolph’s Review
• Sylvia Plath – Fulbright
scholarship: marriage
• Poetry prizes for Hawk in the
Rain, 1957 ‘a poet of the
wild/animals’
• Lupercal, 1960
• Suicide of Plath 1963 – editor for
Plath’s Ariel 1966
• Wodwo, 1967
• 1969: suicide of Assia Wevill –
dark violence of Crow 1970
• HUGHES’s poetry: A reaction against the ‘negative sublime’,
the resigned detachment and wry observations of mostly urban
‘Movement’ poets (Philip Larkin) in the 1950s – Larkin:
‘Deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth’
• For Hughes: Nature is the main inspiration – it is ‘amoral, has
nothing to do with morality, compassion or justice’, brutish
strength
• Al Alvarez, ed. The New Poetry, 1962, 1966 – ‘beyond the
gentility principle’, beyond the idea of politeness, order, a more
or less benevolent God
• HUGHES: brutality and fierce power of nature= humanity’s fall
into scientific rationality/into an alienation from the organic
world – modern man: narrowing his vision
BUT
• Image, symbol, myth and nature + violence =
elemental forces, a reinvention of the essential ties
between humanity and the world
• archaic energies of instinct and feeling are lost, need to
be embraced by pre-Christian mythologies/symbols-
CROW
• The basic OTHERness of animal life, no
sentimentalizing – awe and fear in the observer
• poet/artist – a mediator, uniting two worlds (shaman)
His poetic voice and technique:
• formal simplicity (first volume- trochees and spondees
– Northerner/Middle English, against the grain)
• economy
• jarred rhythms
• repetitiousness
• magical incantation
• presenting an image and thought in a context of raw
action - physical vividness of descriptions.
• Poems: usually tell a story or have narrative elements.
The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers
move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
ars poetica
• first poem in Hawk in the Rain
• inside/outside, human/animal – the
creative process
• ambiguity – ‘prints’, blank page/snow
• sensual experience and observation
• self-reflexivity
• imagination and reality – imaginary fox?
Animals – predatory instincts: Relic and Pike
– Tennyson: ‘nature’s red in tooth and claw’
• Relic: a jawbone found ”at the sea’s edge”= a
relic – philosophy of nature: ”Nothing touches
but, clutching, devours” – a ‘religion’
• Pike (William Blake: The Tiger) – the perfect
predator, the predatory instinct prevailing – from
observation/description to personal memory to
mythical depth and collective memory
(”legendary depth: / It was as deep as England”)
and finally - to intimate and direct contact (”That
rose slowly toward me, watching.”)
Relic
I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold.
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws,
Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws
Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:
This is the sea's achievement; with shells,
Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.
Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.
Pike 1. description
Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
In ponds, under the heat-struck lily padsGloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds
The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date:
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.
Pike 2. childhood memory/home
Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: red fry to themSuddenly there were two. Finally one
With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herbOne jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locksThe same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.
Pike 3. childhood
memory/nature/cultural memory/
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted themStilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly toward me, watching.
Wodwo
What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river's edge
I enter water. Who am I to split
The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed
Of the river above me upside down very clear
What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret
interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
know me and name me to each other have they
seen me before do I fit in their world? I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I've no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it's no use so why do I do it
me and doing that have coincided very queerly
Wodwo
But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go
to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees
till I get tired that's touching one wall of me
for the moment if I sit still how everything
stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
but there's all this what is it roots
roots roots roots and here's the water
again very queer but I'll go on looking
Wodwo - wild man between human
and animal
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Middle English wudewose (Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight) –
on the threshold of nature and
human
”What am I?” repeated, a
resounding question
Human intellect and
consciousness – a burden or a
blessing?
”What am I doing here in mid-air?”
”I seem to have been given the
freedom / of this place what am I
then?”
Strange world, unknown,
frightening - ”I’ll go on looking.”
free-flowing verse with repetitions
– uncertainty
(Wodwo, 1967)
Crow, 1970 (1972)–
Leonard Baskin- drawings
• a sequence of loosely related short poems,
addressing ultimate religious questions
• a narrative: God vs Crow, games
• an antagonist Bible (sometimes Gnostic),
• a myth that parallels and denies the biblical
answers – survival and egoism
• a creation myth, or rather a creation-and-destruction
myth, influenced by oral poetry, mystic incantations and
spells, closely drawing on the trickster myths of North
America’s native inhabitants
• The trickster myth has a hero who is always wandering,
always hungry, who is not guided by socially accepted
conceptions of good and evil – his only will is for survival
(Examination at the Womb-Door – Buddhism)
Examination at the Womb-door
Who owns those scrawny little feet? Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.
Who owns these questionable brains? Death.
All this messy blood? Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.
This wicked little tongue? Death.
This occasional wakefulness? Death.
Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.
Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth?
Who owns all of space? Death.
Who is stronger than hope? Death.
Who is stronger than the will? Death.
Stronger than love? Death.
Stronger than life? Death.
But who is stronger than Death?
Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow.
Death.
Crow
• primerlike vocabulary, simple syntax
(unsubordinated sentences), impersonal
point of view
• Admiration of brutish strength, of
unyielding energy and survival of the fittest
• Crow ‘swallowing up’ everything – words,
meaningful philosophies
• crows-found everywhere (folktales, myths)
Ted Hughes: ”Crow is the undestructible
bird, who, suffering everything, suffers
nothing – like Horatio”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXYMN
Du-qxo)
Crow’s Theology
Crow realized God loved him—
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.
And he realized that God spoke Crow—
Just existing was His revelation.
But what
Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?
And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?
What spoke the silence of lead?
Crow realized there were two Gods—
One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.
A Childish Prank
Man's and woman's bodies lay
without souls,
Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert
On the flowers of Eden.
God pondered.
The problem was so great, it dragged
him asleep.
Crow laughed.
He bit the Worm, God's only son,
Into two writhing halves.
He stuffed into man the tail half
With the wounded end hanging out.
He stuffed the head half headfirst into
woman
And it crept in deeper and up
To peer out through her eyes
Calling it's tail-half to join up quickly,
quickly
Because O it was painful.
Man awoke being dragged across the
grass.
Woman awoke to see him coming.
Neither knew what had happened.
God went on sleeping.
Crow went on laughing.
February 17th (1974)
negative sacrifice – birth and death
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Moortown Diary (1979)
diary entry (1970, Hughes settled in Devon, farm)
first person singular agent of the poem gives an account
of an ill-delivering a lamb which had to be killed (head
hacked off) in order to save its mother – death in birth
unemotional, dryly detailed naturalistic description, no
self-explanatory insertions
Structure: lamb - born – head - body (key words)
Lamb of God=Jesus Christ (John the Baptist, Mass)
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,
have mercy upon us!
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world,
grant us peace!
Agnus Dei
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Stained glass panel, unknown artist, c. 1850
February 17th (excerpts)
A lamb could not get born. Ice wind
Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother
Lay on the muddied slope. Harried, she got up
And the blackish lump bobbed at her back-end
Under her tail. After some hard galloping,
Some manoeuvering, much flapping of the backward
Lump head of the lamb looking out,
I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill
And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen
Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap
Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,
Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,
Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery
Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof,
Right back to the port-hole of the pelvis. […]
February 17th (excerpts)
[…] I roped that baby head
And hauled till she cried out and tried
To get up and I saw it was useless. I went
Two miles for the injection and a razor.
Sliced the lamb's throat-strings, levered with a knife
Between the vertebrae and brought the head off
To stare at its mother, its pipes sitting in the mud
With all earth for a body. Then pushed
The neck-stump right back in, and as I pushed
She pushed. She pushed crying and I pushed gasping.
And the strength
Of the birth push and the push of my thumb
Against that wobbly vertebrae were deadlock,
A to-fro futility.
February 17th (excerpts)
[…] Then like
Pulling myself to the ceiling with one finger
Hooked in a loop, timing my effort
To her birth push groans, I pulled against
The corpse that would not come. Till it came,
And after it the long, sudden, yolk-yellow
Parcel of life
In a smothering slither of oils and soups and syrups –
And the body lay born, beside the hacked-off head.
(17 February 1974)
Birthday Letters
• Ted Hughes, 1998 (Forward Prize for Poetry)
”My book Birthday Letters is a gathering of the
occasions on which I tried to open a direct,
private, inner contact with my first wife – not
thinking to make it a poem, thinking mainly to
evoke her presence to myself, and to feel her
there listening. Except for a handful, I never
thought of publishing these pieces until last year
– when quite suddenly I realized I had to publish
them, no matter what the consequences.”
Birthday Letters, 1989
• Sylvia, 2003 (Gwyneth
Paltrow, Daniel Craig)
• The feminist myth of
Hughes ‘killing’ Sylvia
and Wevill – silence of
Hughes till 1989
• (Love Song, 1970: ”In
their dreams they held
each other hostage” ”in
the morning they wore
each other’s face”)
Lovesong (1970, Crow!)
He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
In the morning they wore each other's face
Confessional
poetry/memory/evocation
• an ardently anti-confessional poet vs literary tradition of
confessions (Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Byron,
Hardy, etc.) and media-ruled postmodern hunger for
‘confession’ (TV shows)
• publishing them before his death – ‘ a sensation of inner
liberation’
• the compelling force of poetry: Hughes, 1995 - ‘Perhaps
it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic –
makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into
words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through
analogies. We think we’re writing something to amuse,
but we’re actually saying something we desperately
need to share.”
• BIRTHDAY – death/birth-rebirth
• Memory – past and present fused – trying to
recreate the original experience as if in the
present/consciusness of the past
• fatalism (peach, Spain, Emily Bronte, bat-bite)
• evocation: we see Sylvia Plath ‘vibrant with life
and radiating death’
• basic opposition (American, urban, alpha
student vs Northerner, son of a joiner) and
‘writing out of one brain’
Fulbright Scholars
• dying Hughes – recalling his first glimpse at Sylvia
• uncertainty of memory: ”Were you among them?” – ”I
remember that thought. Not / Your face.”
• The future hidden in the past, which is presented as
recreated present: ”Noted your long hair, loose waves - /
Your Veronica Lake bang. Not what it hid.” – ”Your
exaggerated American / Grin for the cameras, the
judges, the strangers, the frighteners.”
• Eating fresh peach for the first time (cf. Prufrock ‘dare I
eat a peach?’) –
”At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
By my ignorance of the simplest things”
narrative/’Greek tragedy’/dialogue
• Otto Plath, the dead father – Hughes the husband –
‘ghosts’/Sylvia’s drama
• Your Paris – You Hated Spain – basic differences of
vision, conscious vs unconscious (”Spain frightened you.
Spain / Where I felt at home.” ”Spain was the land of
your dreams: the dust-red cadaver/ You dared not wake
with”)
• Wuthering Heights – places/writers/fates haunting – still
”your huge / Mortgage of hope”
• 9 Willow Street: memory attached to places – ordinary
events → premonition: bat-bite/sacrifice and danger:
”This was the bat-light we were living in: death”
• Reflecting on himself/their relationship/Sylvia’s poems
Ted Hughes: poet, writer,
playwright
• National Theatre,
Peter Brook –
Orghast – a play in an
invented language,
myth of Prometheus
• books for children
(Iron Man, MoonWhales)
• translating Pilinszky
• Ted Hughes Award –
funded by Carol Ann
Duffy, the present
Poet Laureate