The Poetry of Ted Hughes

Language, Illusion & Beyond

Dr. Paul Bentley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317892908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This text provides a lucid and accessible introduction to the poetry of Ted Hughes, a major figure in twentieth- century poetry whose work is concerned with the forces of nature and their interaction with the human mind. It is also the first full length study to place Hughes's poetry in the context of significant developments in literary theory that have occured during his life, drawing in particular on the 'French theorists'- Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes. The study sheds new light on Hughes's prosody, and on such matters as Hughes's relation to the 'Movement' poets, the influence of Sylvia Plath, his relation to Romanticism, his interest in myth and shamanism, and the implications of the Laureateship for his work. The poems are presented in chronological order, tracing the development of Hughes's highly distinctive style. The study also discusses Hughes's recently published non-fiction- Winter Pollen (1994) and Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992).

The Poetry of Ted Hughes is indispensable for all students and academics interested in contemporary poetry and culture.

Chapter One
Early Hughes

‘Archaic Energies’

The title poem which opens Hughes’s first volume of poems, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), places its speaker in a landscape of violent experience and hallucination:

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up

Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,

From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle

With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.

His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,

Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.

The pummelling, Middle-English stresses and full vowels of the first stanza threaten to overwhelm the sense of the lines, while the proliferation of fricative consonants over the enjambment on line four and into the second stanza gives this stanza a buoyant, airy feel: the vertiginous switch between contrasting sound patterns registers on a phonological level the split represented in the poem between mental ideal — the hawk seems to represent an ideal of self-possession for floundering I-speaker — and physical reality, as if the elemental onslaught had reactivated a normally repressed infantile experience of bodily uncoordination and helplessness. The homophone 1/ eye suggests a dialectic between the I-speaker’s experience of turbulent disorder and the illusion (‘Steady as a hallucination’) of transcendence embodied by the hawk, as if the former necessitated and propelled the latter. In this the poem insinuates the delusive mechanics at work behind the ‘metaphysical’ self, a self that seeks its ideal unity only at the cost of repressing its bodily reality.

The theme of beset selfhood is pursued in various forms in The Hawk in the Rain, forming the gist of both the ‘love’ poems (‘Song’, ‘Parlour-Piece’, ‘The Dove Breeder’, ‘Billet-Doux’, ‘A Modest Proposal’, ‘Incompatibilities’) and war poems (‘The Casualty’, ‘Bayonet Charge’, ‘Six Young Men’), as well as of the less successful discursive poems — ‘Egg-Head’ and ‘The Man Seeking Experience Enquires His Way of a Drop of Water’ — which posit an Olympian perspective on human folly that seems out of key with Hughes’s intimation of the illusory status of the unitary, metaphysical self.

The animal poems of the volume — ‘The Jaguar’, ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘The Horses’ — are in this sense more successful in that they forestall the possibility of an all-knowing, didactic, ‘authoritative’ voice, a voice that presides over other poems in the same volume. ‘The Jaguar’ ends:

He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:

His stride is wildernesses of freedom:

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Over the cage floor the horizons come.

The poem’s speaker here is more mesmerized than knowing; the poem echoes Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ as the big cat is elevated — with the aid of the speaker’s awed imagination — to universal proportions. The echo of Blake points up Hughes’s neo-Romantic conception of the imagination as a creative and regenerative faculty, although in Hughes’s case this conception comes to be increasingly subject to a more modern, post-Freudian sense of the failings of language and of the human capacity for self-delusion. However, the muscular language of the last two lines here — the emphatic stress patterns and heavy assonance — seems to want to become what it describes: the poems at this stage show little recognition of any fault line between signifier (word) and signified (thing, concept), a recognition that is to become central to Hughes’s later poetic.

The poem ‘Pike’, from Hughes’s second volume Lupercal (1960), elaborates a similar intuition to ‘The Jaguar’, but with more subtlety and irony. The opening stanza begins with a seemingly objective description of the fish (the repeated ‘p’s emphasize the feeling of objective precision):

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.

Even here though, the noun-as-verb ‘tigering’, conspicuous as the only verb within the opening noun-phrase, seems to signal a potential for imaginative disturbance within the factual, specimen-case style of description, while the weirdly enigmatic ‘grin’ seems to signal that something about the fish remains unaccounted for. The last line of the stanza has a kind of fleeting, anarchic suggestiveness about it: the fish are dancing ‘on the surface of the water ‘among the flies’, defying their empirical confines and anticipating the disorientating perspectives of the final stanza.

The conceit with which the second stanza opens — the pike ‘move, stunned by their own grandeur’ — registers more overtly the speaker’s imaginative participation in the pike’s movement. By the last line of this stanza the fish have swollen (much like the jaguar in the earlier poem) from their initial length of ‘three inches long’ to ‘A hundred feet long in their world’, while later in the poem the pond (itself enlarged from ‘fifty feet across’ to become ‘as deep as England’) is said to hold ‘Pike too immense to stir’. The poem’s preoccupation with measuring implies a critique of empiricism; the description shifts ground in the poem from objective detail to an apprehension of something primordial that defies and threatens to supplant rational consciousness. The influence of Jung can be felt here — Jung writes: ‘We may be able to indicate the limits of consciousness, but the unconscious is simply the unknown psyche and for that reason illimitable because indeterminable. Such being the case, we should not be in the least surprised if the empirical manifestations of unconscious contents bear all the marks of something illimitable, something not determined by space and time. This quality is numinous and therefore alarming, above all to a cautious mind that knows the value of precisely delimited concepts’¹. This ‘illimitable’ unconscious remains undefined in Hughes’s poem (the poem is about more than a type of fish); it is not caught or ‘delimited’ but slips the net of numbers and measurements cast by the poem’s speaker:

Three we kept behind glass,

Jungled in weed: three inches, four,

And four and a half: fed fiy to them —

Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.

As the empirical calculations come to nothing within their own inexorable logic, we retain only the image of the mocking, knouring grin, a grin which suggests a sardonic appraisal of ‘The objective, scientific, fact watching attitude, (…) this detached, passively recording attitude’ that Hughes insists ‘is useless in the most vital activity of all. The activity of understanding ourselves’². The dialectic the poem establishes between this ‘detached, passively recording attitude’ (‘A pond I fished, fifty yards across’), and the stirrings of an awed imagination (‘It was as deep as England’), finds its apotheosis towards the end of the poem: the dreamlike subversion of the quotidian world, evocatively captured in the image of the ‘Owls hushing the floating woods’, with the line’s nervous, shuddering assonance, brings with it a concomitant decentring of the rational self, pointed up by the paradox of intentionality contained in ‘I dared not cast/ But silently cast’ and the confusion of hunter and hunted in the final stanza. The menacingly non-finite ‘watching’, on which the poem ends, leaves the I-speaker poised on the threshold of a psychical realm whose edges evade fixity, and whose aggressive, primordial phantoms threaten with engulfment the empirical ground upon which the rational self stands.

Stylistically, the poem is saved from portentousness by the way in which, as Leonard Scigaj puts it, ‘the tone acts as a buffer against the sensationalism of the most memorable of the details’³. Knowledgeable understatement — ‘And indeed they spare nobody’ — turns to comic overstatement — ‘With the hair frozen on my head’ — as the speaker’s empirical bearings begin to slide and the pike (and what they represent) come into their own. The language of the poem is accordingly more careful and tentative than that of ‘The Jaguar’ and other early poems — the primordial thing here resists being embodied in human terms.

The emergence of supplanting energies within the self constitutes what is perhaps the central thematic preoccupation of Lupercal. The celebrated animals of the volume — the pike, the hawk, the otter, the thrushes, the ‘Bull Moses’ — typically function as mirrors in which this inner drama is to some degree apprehended. This is not to deny the concentration the poems focus on the animals as animals. The first strength of the poems lies in the way they register the intractable presence of the animal, those aspects of its being that remain finally beyond appropriation in human terms. The bull in ‘The Bull Moses’ is ‘too deep in itself to be called to (…) nothing of our light/ Found any reflection in him’: it is precisely this sharply focused concentration on the material otherness of the animals — an otherness that resists the ego’s narcissistic tendency to seek its own ‘reflection’ in things — that suggests a corresponding negotiation of similarly intractable energies in the self. In ‘An Otter’ the otter is ‘neither fish nor beast’ — it fails to reciprocate standard notions and definitions of how things are; the implied analogy in these poems between the animal and something slippery and indefinite in the self is here made explicit: ‘So the self under the eye lies,/ Attendant and withdrawn’

In ‘View of a Pig’ the I-speaker is disturbed by the sight of a dead pig. What keeps the poem moving is the repeated attempt to frame the unsettling sight, to give it a meaning and thus assimilate it to consciousness, an attempt that repeatedly falls flat: ‘further off even than death (somehow outweighing even that particular ‘meaning’ or concept), the dead pig is not ‘able to accuse’, it has no ‘dignity’, it is no ‘figure of fun’, ‘Too dead now to pity’, and so on. What seems an idle thought — ‘How could it be moved?’ — is in this sense the key to the poem’s own ‘meaning’ as such: the dead pig here embodies what is intractable (it cannot be ‘moved’ within or by language) and thus disturbing for a consciousness that constitutes itself through its ability to represent the world to itself.

The poem ‘Mayday on Holdemess’ revolves the main themes of Lupercal. The title of the poem draws on a number of associations (just as the poem itself moves largely by association): apart from Mayday’s archaic association with pagan fertility festivals and more recent links with International Labour Day, the title also suggests, in the context of the poem, a distress call, a suggestion confirmed by the later reference in the poem to Gallipoli. The distress call as such is by implication that of ‘The small piloting consciousness of the bright-eyed objective intelligence’ that Hughes credits with having ‘steered its body and soul into a hell’⁴. The ‘hell’ intimated in the poem is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Early Hughes
• 2. Crow
• 3. Gaudete
• 4. Cave Birds
• 5. Later Hughes
• 6. Hughes as Laureate
• Works Cited
• Index