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 âtigeringâ, 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 âgrinâ 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 âon the surface of the water âamong the fliesâ, defying their empirical confines and anticipating the disorientating perspectives of the final stanza.
The conceit with which the second stanza opens â the pike âmove, stunned by their own grandeurâ â registers more overtly the speakerâs imaginative participation in the pikeâs 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 âthree inches longâ to âA hundred feet long in their worldâ, while later in the poem the pond (itself enlarged from âfifty feet acrossâ to become âas deep as Englandâ) is said to hold âPike too immense to stirâ. The poemâs 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 â Jung writes: âWe 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 conceptsâ1. This âillimitableâ unconscious remains undefined in Hughesâs poem (the poem is about more than a type of fish); it is not caught or âdelimitedâ but slips the net of numbers and measurements cast by the poemâs speaker:
Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fiy to them â
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 âThe objective, scientific, fact watching attitude, (âŚ) this detached, passively recording attitudeâ that Hughes insists âis useless in the most vital activity of all. The activity of understanding ourselvesâ2. The dialectic the poem establishes between this âdetached, passively recording attitudeâ (âA pond I fished, fifty yards acrossâ), and the stirrings of an awed imagination (âIt was as deep as Englandâ), finds its apotheosis towards the end of the poem: the dreamlike subversion of the quotidian world, evocatively captured in the image of the âOwls hushing the floating woodsâ, with the lineâs nervous, shuddering assonance, brings with it a concomitant decentring of the rational self, pointed up by the paradox of intentionality contained in âI dared not cast/ But silently castâ and the confusion of hunter and hunted in the final stanza. The menacingly non-finite âwatchingâ, 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, âthe tone acts as a buffer against the sensationalism of the most memorable of the detailsâ3. Knowledgeable understatement â âAnd indeed they spare nobodyâ â turns to comic overstatement â âWith the hair frozen on my headâ â as the speakerâs 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 âThe Jaguarâ and other early poems â 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 â the pike, the hawk, the otter, the thrushes, the âBull Mosesâ â 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 âThe Bull Mosesâ is âtoo deep in itself to be called to (âŚ) nothing of our light/ Found any reflection in himâ: it is precisely this sharply focused concentration on the material otherness of the animals â an otherness that resists the egoâs narcissistic tendency to seek its own âreflectionâ in things â that suggests a corresponding negotiation of similarly intractable energies in the self. In âAn Otterâ the otter is âneither fish nor beastâ â 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: âSo the self under the eye lies,/ Attendant and withdrawnâ
In âView of a Pigâ 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: âfurther off even than death (somehow outweighing even that particular âmeaningâ or concept), the dead pig is not âable to accuseâ, it has no âdignityâ, it is no âfigure of funâ, âToo dead now to pityâ, and so on. What seems an idle thought â âHow could it be moved?â â is in this sense the key to the poemâs own âmeaningâ as such: the dead pig here embodies what is intractable (it cannot be âmovedâ within or by language) and thus disturbing for a consciousness that constitutes itself through its ability to represent the world to itself.
The poem âMayday on Holdemessâ 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 Maydayâs 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 âThe small piloting consciousness of the bright-eyed objective intelligenceâ that Hughes credits with having âsteered its body and soul into a hellâ4. The âhellâ intimated in the poem is ...