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… 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.

The Hawk in the Rain. The Thought-Fox

My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly— I kill where I please because it is all mine.

Hawk Roosting [1960]

3

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock’s loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move.

The Hawk in the Rain [1957]. The Thought-Fox

3

Work and Play

Work and Play

The swallow of summer, she toils all the summer,
A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,
A whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air.


But the serpent of cars that crawls through the dust

In shimmering exhaust

Searching to slake

Its fever in ocean

Will play and be idle or else it will bust.


The swallow of summer, the barbed harpoon,
She flings from the furnace, a rainbow of purples,
Dips her glow in the pond and is perfect.

But the serpent of cars that collapsed on the beach

Disgorges its organs

A scamper of colours

Which roll like tomatoes

Nude as tomatoes

With sand in their creases

To cringe in the sparkle of rollers and screech.


The swallow of summer, the seamstress of summer,
She scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it,
She draws a long thread and she knots it at the corners.


But the holiday people

Are laid out like wounded

Flat as in ovens

Roasting and basting

With faces of torment as space burns them blue

Their heads are transistors

Their teeth grit on sand grains

Their lost kids are squalling

While man-eating flies

Jab electric shock needles but what can they do?


They can climb in their cars with raw bodies, raw faces

And start up the serpent

And headache it homeward

A car full of squabbles

And sobbing and stickiness

With sand in their crannies

Inhaling petroleum

That pours from the foxgloves

While the evening swallow
The swallow of summer, cartwheeling through crimson,
Touches the honey-slow river and turning
Returns to the hand stretched from under the eaves -
A boomerang of rejoicing shadow.
336

Tractor

Tractor


The tractor stands frozen - an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.


It defied flesh and won't start.
Hands are like wounds already
Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable
As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.
I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it
The copse hisses - capitulates miserably
In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,
A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over
Towards plantations Eastward.
All the time the tractor is sinking
Through the degrees, deepening
Into its hell of ice.


The starting lever
Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.
The battery is alive - but like a lamb
Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother -
While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites
With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined
In one solid lump.


I squirt commercial sure-fire
Down the black throat - it just coughs.
It ridicules me - a trap of iron stupidity
I've stepped into. I drive the battery
As if I were hammering and hammering
The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer
And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly
Into happy life.


And stands
Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly
Like a demon demonstrating
A more-than-usually-complete materialization -
Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity
With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion
Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon
Shouting Where Where?


Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels
Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,
Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.
The blind and vibrating condemned obedience
Of iron to the cruelty of iron,



Wheels screeched out of their night-locks -

Fingers
Among the tormented
Tonnage and burning of iron


Eyes
Weeping in the wind of chloroform


And the tractor, streaming with sweat,
Raging and trembling and rejoicing.
413

Thistles

Thistles


Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.


Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up


From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.


Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
529

The Seven Sorrows

The Seven Sorrows

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.


The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.


And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.


The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.


And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.


And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.


And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.
677

The Warm and the Cold

The Warm and the Cold

Freezing dusk is closing
Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
That can no longer feel.
But the carp is in its depth
Like a planet in its heaven.
And the badger in its bedding
Like a loaf in the oven.
And the butterfly in its mummy
Like a viol in its case.
And the owl in its feathers
Like a doll in its lace.


Freezing dusk has tightened
Like a nut screwed tight
On the starry aeroplane
Of the soaring night.
But the trout is in its hole
Like a chuckle in a sleeper.
The hare strays down the highway
Like a root going deeper.
The snail is dry in the outhouse
Like a seed in a sunflower.
The owl is pale on the gatepost
Like a clock on its tower.


Moonlight freezes the shaggy world
Like a mammoth of ice -
The past and the future
Are the jaws of a steel vice.
But the cod is in the tide-rip
Like a key in a purse.
The deer are on the bare-blown hill
Like smiles on a nurse.
The flies are behind the plaster
Like the lost score of a jig.
Sparrows are in the ivy-clump
Like money in a pig.


Such a frost
The flimsy moon
Has lost her wits.

A star falls.


The sweating farmers
Turn in their sleep
Like oxen on spits.
676

The Minotaur

The Minotaur

The mahogany table-top you smashed
Had been the broad plank top
Of my mother's heirloom sideboard-
Mapped with the scars of my whole life.


That came under the hammer.
That high stool you swung that day
Demented by my being
Twenty minutes late for baby-minding.


'Marvellous!' I shouted, 'Go on,
Smash it into kindling.
That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!'
And later, considered and calmer,


'Get that shoulder under your stanzas
And we'll be away.' Deep in the cave of your ear
The goblin snapped his fingers.
So what had I given him?


The bloody end of the skein
That unravelled your marriage,
Left your children echoing
Like tunnels in a labyrinth.


Left your mother a dead-end,
Brought you to the horned, bellowing
Grave of your risen father
And your own corpse in it.
348

September

September


We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.


It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.


We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads


Like an unfortunate King's and his Queen's
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.
409

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Identification and basic context

Edward James "Ted" Hughes was a highly influential English poet, translator, and playwright. He is widely regarded as one of the most significant poets of the post-war era, known for his intense engagement with nature, myth, and the animal world. His major collections include The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Crow (1970), Moortown (1979), and Birthday Letters (1998). Born on August 17, 1930, in Mytholmroyd, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, he died on October 28, 1998, in North Tawton, Devon, England. His family background was working-class, with strong ties to the Yorkshire landscape, which profoundly shaped his poetic vision. He wrote exclusively in English.

Childhood and education

Hughes's childhood was spent in the rugged landscape of Yorkshire, an environment that deeply influenced his early perceptions and later poetry. His family ran a small shop, and his father had served in the trenches of World War I, experiences that he later incorporated into his work. He attended Mirfield Grammar School, where he discovered his passion for poetry. After completing his National Service, he studied English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, though he later transferred to study archaeology and anthropology, interests that would continue to inform his work. He was an avid reader, absorbing influences from classical mythology, folklore, and early English literature.

Literary trajectory

Hughes's poetic career began to gain momentum in the early 1950s. His first major collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), published by Faber and Faber, announced his arrival with its powerful, often violent, imagery and uncompromising engagement with the natural world. This collection established his reputation for a rugged, elemental style. He continued to develop this distinctive voice through subsequent works like Lupercal (1960) and Wodwo (1967). The Crow sequence (1970) marked a significant shift, employing a more mythic and philosophical approach, often using the trickster figure of Crow to explore themes of creation, destruction, and survival. His later works, such as Moortown and Birthday Letters, continued to explore personal experiences, myth, and the natural world with profound insight.

Works, style, and literary characteristics

Hughes's major works include The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Crow, Moortown, and Birthday Letters. His dominant themes are the power and brutality of nature, the interconnectedness of life and death, the presence of myth and ritual in contemporary life, and the struggle for survival. Hughes's style is characterized by its directness, its potent imagery drawn from the animal kingdom and the natural landscape, and its often startling violence. He employed strong rhythms and a muscular diction, frequently using Anglo-Saxon influences. His poems often feature animals—hawks, wolves, otters, badgers—as protagonists, exploring their instincts and their place in the larger cosmic order. He sought to return poetry to a more primal, elemental state, moving away from what he saw as the overly intellectualized or personal poetry of his predecessors. His innovations included a bold re-engagement with myth and a visceral portrayal of the animal psyche.

Cultural and historical context

Hughes lived through the latter half of the 20th century, a period marked by significant social and political change, including the Cold War, decolonization, and evolving attitudes towards the environment. His work, while often rooted in ancient myths and the natural world, resonated with contemporary anxieties about humanity's place in a rapidly changing and often violent world. He was associated with the "Movement" poets but forged a distinct path, often seen as more primal and less overtly political than some of his contemporaries. His marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath and their subsequent, highly publicized, personal tragedies also placed him in the public eye, sometimes overshadowing his literary achievements.

Personal life

Hughes's personal life was marked by both profound love and intense tragedy. His marriage to Sylvia Plath, another highly regarded poet, was a central event in his life and the subject of his later collection Birthday Letters. Their relationship was passionate but also tumultuous, and Plath's suicide in 1963 cast a long shadow over his life and work. He later married Carol Orchard. Hughes was known for his deep connection to the land and his often solitary existence, dedicating much of his life to his writing and his love for animals and nature. He held strong beliefs about the spiritual and restorative power of the natural world.

Recognition and reception

Hughes achieved considerable recognition during his lifetime. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984, a position he held until his death, succeeding Sir John Betjeman. His work was consistently praised for its power, originality, and depth. While some critics found his work too violent or obscure, his reputation grew steadily, and he is now considered a central figure in 20th-century British poetry. His poems are widely anthologized and studied in schools and universities.

Influences and legacy

Hughes was influenced by classical poets, Shakespeare, the Romantics, and modernists, as well as by folklore, mythology, and anthropology. His legacy is immense; he revitalized the English poetic tradition by reintroducing a sense of mythic depth, elemental power, and visceral engagement with the natural world. He inspired generations of poets to explore the primal forces within nature and the human psyche, and to write with a bolder, more muscular language. His influence is evident in the work of many contemporary poets who continue to grapple with similar themes.

Interpretation and critical analysis

Hughes's poetry invites analysis of its relationship to myth, its exploration of the animal psyche, and its commentary on human violence and survival. Critics often discuss the balance between the beautiful and the brutal in his work, the role of myth in understanding contemporary experience, and the complex personal resonances within his poems, particularly concerning his relationship with Sylvia Plath. His poems continue to provoke discussion about humanity's relationship with nature and its own darker impulses.

Curiosities and lesser-known aspects

Beyond his poetry, Hughes was also a significant children's author, writing books such as The Iron Man. He had a deep respect for animals and often found solace and inspiration in observing them. His dedication to his craft was unwavering, and he was known for his meticulous attention to language and form. His life, particularly his relationship with Sylvia Plath, has been the subject of considerable biographical and critical attention.

Death and memory

Ted Hughes died in London in 1998. His death was widely mourned, and his status as a major poet was firmly established. His final collection, Birthday Letters, published shortly before his death, offered a poignant and deeply personal reflection on his life and relationships. His legacy continues to be celebrated through ongoing critical study, new editions of his work, and the enduring influence of his powerful and elemental verse.