The Poetry of Ted Hughes

[Thropplenoggin]

You Hated Spain

Spain frightened you. Spain.
Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African
Black edges to everything, frightened you.

... from Birthday Letters

Unlike Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes is someone that never materialised in my undergrad studies and later, more esoteric poetry reading. Earlier this week, I happened upon this poem in Andrew Motion's generally excellent anthology, Here To Eternity (Faber), and was struck both by the potency of this opening gambit (casually conversational) and by the visceral brilliance of diction and imagery - "oiled anchovy faces" is superb.

I intend to acquire his Birthday Letters collection toute de suite and wondered what other poetry-minded forumites thought of Hughes as a poet. Is there a particular collection of his you would commend to the, um, unversed?

[Tevot]

Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

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.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

[Serial_Apologist]

Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

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.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

Thorns snag in the mind of Hughes's work as much as autumn promised mellow fruitfulness for his nature-proclaiming poet-forbears. He must've especially admired the hawk, from earth-bound vantage point. Another of his poems speaks of the bird meeting its demise by the weather coming the wrong way. Very coincidentally I happened just now to be listening to a tape of Hugh Wood's 1966 mixed choral setting of it.

[jayne lee wilson]

Oh Throstles! (now there's a Hughesuan nickname...) You just have to read "Crow". The darkest, bleakest, funniest, most extreme of all his volumes, I defy anyone not to read most of it in one go - dip in anywhere and you're hooked (almost literally, and bleeding too...)

CROW'S THEOLOGY:
"Crow realised God loved him-
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

And he realised 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 realised there were two Gods-

One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons."

From "Crow Tyrannosaurus":
"And the dog was a bulging filterbag
Of all the deaths it had gulped for the flesh and the bones.
It could not digest their screeching finales.
Its shapeless cry was a blort of all their voices."

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/ted-hughes-reads-from-crow

[Thropplenoggin]

Oh Throstles! (now there's a Hughesuan nickname...) You just have to read "Crow". The darkest, bleakest, funniest, most extreme of all his volumes, I defy anyone not to read most of it in one go - dip in anywhere and you're hooked (almost literally, and bleeding too...)

Yoiks! Beautifully bleak and bleakly beautiful. I'll be adding it to my list. Thanks for that, our kid!

--

And thank you, Tevot, for your delightful addition to the thread.

[antongould]

Currently re-reading Motion's excellent A Writer's Life Philip Larkin and had forgotten PL's, almost, dislike of Hughes .......and I have to say currently I see where he's coming from.

[Thropplenoggin]

Currently re-reading Motion's excellent A Writer's Life Philip Larkin and had forgotten PL's, almost, dislike of Hughes .......and I have to say currently I see where he's coming from.

Is this dislike based on his poetry or on his personality? Can't the art be enjoyed regardless of the artist's character? Larkin's casual racism running through his letters, say. Does this stop me enjoying 'Home Is So Sad'?

Unfortunately, AG, life is more complex than the world presented by SMP on Breakfast.

[Belgrove]

Do try his 'Tales from Ovid; Twenty-Four Passages from the "Metamorphoses"'. Wonderful narrative poems set in his characteristic muscular style. He always coins fresh and striking imagery.

Also, Season Songs, lovely poems celebrating the passage of the year, from birth to death, in the flora and fauna of rural England, lyrical and with a musical sensibility.


The Harvest Moon

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.
The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.
And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum.

So people can't sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come!

And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!' and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.

[antongould]

Is this dislike based on his poetry or on his personality? Can't the art be enjoyed regardless of the artist's character? Larkin's casual racism running through his letters, say. Does this stop me enjoying 'Home Is So Sad'?

Unfortunately, AG, life is more complex than the world presented by SMP on Breakfast.

Purely the poetry but probably I'm not there yet Thropps........when I retire the light (and dark) may dawn!

[Il Grande Inquisitor]

Do try his 'Tales from Ovid; Twenty-Four Passages from the "Metamorphoses"'. Wonderful narrative poems set in his characteristic muscular style. He always coins fresh and striking imagery.

Agreed. I used his retelling of the Midas fable when teaching narrative poetry. Hughes recorded them and you can sense him relishing the language as he rolls it around his tongue:

Almost inadvertently he stroked
The door pillars, as he entered the palace,
Pausing to watch the brilliant yellow
Suffuse the dark stone.
He washed his hands under flowing water, at a fountain.
Already a hope
Told him that the gift might wash away,
As waking will wash out a nightmare.
But the water that touched him
Coiled into the pool below as plumes
Of golden smoke, settling heavily
In a silt of gold atoms.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Birthday Letters[/I] collection toute de suite and wondered what other poetry-minded forumites thought of Hughes as a poet. Is there a particular collection of his you would commend to the, um, unversed?

Birthday Letters are Hughes' "late Quartets": deeply intimate and confessional (in the best sense of that word) as if we're being confided in - but so intensely personal it almost seems an intrusion to read some of those poems. Tales from Ovid is more public - a communal experience. Both collections contain some of the finest poetry ever written.

There is a Collected Poems edition, but rather less expensive, and a splendid overview of the work is the New Selected Poems, 1957 - 94:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=ted+hughes+collected+poems&sprefix=ted+hug%2Cstripbooks%2C188

Heptonstall Cemetery

Wind slams across the tops.
The spray cuts upward.

You claw your way
Over a giant beating wing.

And Thomas and Walter and Edith
Are living feathers

Esther and Sylvia
Living feathers

Where all the horizons lift wings
A family of dark swans

And go beating low through storm-silver
Toward the Atlantic.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

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 then 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 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.

[johncorrigan]

Sorry to be lazy but I do love to hear him read 'Pike'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvk-lHIs9GI

[Belgrove]

There seems to be some enthusiasm for the poetry of Hughes expressed here. Although introduced to him when taking O Level English Literature (The Bayonet Charge), I have only scratched the surface of his huge output and would be eager to learn from others of their particular favourite collections or individual poems.

Moortown Diary is another volume I enjoy rereading, lovely examples of his nature poetry and the changing seasons.

Towards the end of his life he took to writing fresh versions of classical theatre texts. These are definitely worth exploring.

His Orestia is one of the greatest translations of those works in English, poetic but intensely dramatic too, as shown by the National Theatre's use of the version in its last production in 2000.

Alcestis is one of the satyr plays of Euripides that questions the capriciousness of the Gods. It has a rumbustious portrayal of Heracles. Not seen this staged though.

Phedre reworks Racine. This version was used, to splendid effect, in the National Theatre's last production with Helen Mirren as the besotted and dangerous queen. As the curtain went up I recall the audience's gasps to the sun drenched set, so evocative of the Mediterranean and providing the perfect setting for presenting the pent-up passions on display. It imbued a sultry heat flowing out across the auditorium. Hughes avoids Racine's adherence to the Alexandrine, and thereby is able to achieve theatrical function over stylistic form.