Ted hughes edulink version

Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

• He was born Edward James Hughes in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, the son of William Hughes, a carpenter and a veteran of World War I.

• As a boy Hughes spent much of his time fishing, hunting, and studying animals, and his childhood fascination with the cruelty and power of the natural world would later inform some of his most famous and distinctive poems.

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After two years of national service in the Royal Air Force, he studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, where he read English before changing to archaeology and anthropology. It was at Cambridge that he met the American poet Sylvia Plath, whom he married in 1956.

Plath encouraged him to pursue his poetic vocation, and they lived together in the United States, teaching and writing, until 1959. Hughes's first collection of poems, Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957, followed by Lupercal (1960) and Wodwo (1967).

Many of the finest poems in these volumes describe animals, characteristically using bold metaphors and dramatic, physical language. They often concentrate on the deadly violence of the natural world, made manifest in jaguars, pikes, hawks, and even thrushes.

• His later volumes include Crow (1970), Cave Birds (1978), and Birthday Letters (1998). The last collected 88 poems written by Hughes over 25 years, almost all directed to Plath or focusing on their relationship.

• Ted Hughes died at his home in Devon, England, on October 28, 1998. He was 68 years old.

• Hughes was a brilliant and prolific poet, regarded by many as one of the best of his generation. However, this was regularly overshadowed by speculation regarding his tragic relationship with his first wife, American poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963.

• His experiences of the Yorkshire countryside (especially the wild moors) as a boy gave him an interest in nature.

• However, he saw nature as threatening and harsh; as amoral and often violent.

• Saw nature as pitted against the civilizing norms of society.

• Hughes was interested in the darker, more instinctual side of nature (including human nature).

• Irreligious; interested in pagan rituals and shamanism.

• Poetry as trance; as a trance-like state in which a deeper reality is accessed.

• What lies below the veneer of culture / civilization in human beings?

• By examining the ruthless, instinctive behaviour of animals, Hughes revealed the distance between human civilization and its primitive origins.

• His poetry continually seeks to reconnect language to its unconscious source.

• The poet as shaman?

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far asThe coal-house door. I dared once to look upThrough the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyesThe tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,At any second to bang and vanish with a flap:The wind flung a magpie away and a black-Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the noteThat any second would shatter it. Now deepIn chairs, in front of the great fire, we gripOur hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,Seeing the window tremble to come in,Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfectPike 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, silhouetteOf submarine delicacy and horror.A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads – Gloom 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 fangsNot to be changed at this date;A life subdued to its instrument;The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,Jungled in weed: three inches, four,And four and a half: fed fry to them –Suddenly 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-herb –

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet: The outside eye stared: as a vice locks – The same iron in this eyeThough its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,Whose lilies and muscular tenchHad outlasted every visible stoneOf the monastery that planted them –

Stilled legendary depth:It was as deep as England. It heldPike too immense to stir, so immense and oldThat past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fishedWith the hair frozen on my headFor what might move, for what eye might move.The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woodsFrail on my ear against the dreamDarkness beneath night's darkness had freed, That rose slowly towards me, watching.

Pike





Three we kept behind glass,Jungled in weed: three inches, four,And four and a half: fed fry to them – Suddenly there were two. Finally one







Pike





Three we kept behind glass,Jungled in weed: three inches, four,And four and a half: fed fry to them – Suddenly there were two. Finally one









Movement of poem:

• Light darkness• Youthfulness age / antiquity• Pet monster• Outward description fear /loathing (detached) (deeply felt)• Small large• Hunter (controller) hunted• Youthful recollection foreboding of

adult

River

Fallen from heaven, lies acrossThe lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go onIssuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightnessThrough its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buriedIts dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils.It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pitIt will return stainless

For the delivery of this world.So the river is a god

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.

November

The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake,Treed with iron and birdless. In the sunk laneThe ditch – a seep silent all summer –

Made brown foam with a big voice: that, and my boots On the lane’s scrubbed stones, in the gulleyed leaves, Against the hill’s hanging silence;Mist silvering the droplets on the bare thorns

Slower than the change of daylight.In a let of the ditch a tramp was bundled asleep: Face tucked down into beard, drawn inUnder its hair like a hedgehog’s. I took him for dead,

But his stillness separated from the deathOf the rotting grass and the ground. A wind chilled,And a fresh comfort tightened through him,Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve.

His ankles, bound with sacking and hairy band, Rubbed each other, resettling. The wind hardened;A puff shook a glittering from the thorns,And again the rains’ dragging grey columns

Smudged the farms. In a momentThe fields were jumping and smoking; the thorns Quivered, riddled with the glassy verticals.I stayed on under the welding cold

Watching the tramp’s face glisten and the drops on his coat Flash and darken. I thought what strong trustSlept in him – as the trickling furrows slept,And the thorn-roots in their grip on darkness;

And the buried stones, taking the weight of winter;The hill where the hare crouched with clenched teeth. Rain plastered the land till it was shiningLike hammered lead, and I ran, and in the rushing wood

Shuttered by a black oak leaned.The keeper’s gibbet had owls and hawks By the neck, weasels, a gang of cats, crows: Some, stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits

In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape, Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests, Patient to outwait these worst days that beat Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.

The Jaguar

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strutLike cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coilIs a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, orStinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrivesAt a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enragedThrough prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—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 Bull Moses

A hoist up and I could lean overThe upper edge of the high half-door,My left foot ledged on the hinge, and look in at the byre’sBlaze of darkness: a sudden shut-eyed lookBackward into the head.

Blackness is depthBeyond star. But the warm weight of his breathing,The ammoniac reek of his litter, the hotly-tonguedMash of his cud, steamed against me.

Then, slowly, as onto the mind’s eye – The brow like masonry, the deep-keeled neck:Something come up there onto the brink of the gulf,Hadn’t heard of the world, too deep in itself to be called to,Stood in sleep. He would swing his muzzle at a flyBut the square of sky where I hung, shouting, waving,Was nothing to him; nothing of our lightFound any reflection in him.

Each dusk the farmer led himDown to the pond to drink and smell the air,And he took no pace but the farmerLed him to take it, as if he knew nothingOf the ages and continents of his fathers,Shut, while he wombed, to a dark shedAnd steps between his door and the duckpond;The weight of the sun and the moon and the world

hammeredTo a ring of brass through his nostrils.

He would raiseHis streaming muzzle and look out over the meadows, But the grasses whispered nothing awake, the fetchOf the distance drew nothing to momentumIn the locked black of his powers. He came strolling

gently back,Paused neither toward the pigpens on his right,Nor toward the cow-byres on his left: somethingDeliberate in his leisure, some beheld futureFounding in his quiet.

I kept the door wide,Closed it after him and pushed the bolt.

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