Ted Hughes

1930 – 1998

Carol Wolff

Private Life

• Married Sylvia Plath(1932-1963)

• They had two children. • Later they separated,

which may have contributed to the suicide of Plath in 1963.

His Poetry

• He was aware of violent forces of nature.• He wrote with great powers of imagination.• His writing was very cynical, written in rough,

harsh, sometimes disjointed lines, emphasizing the scheming and savagery of animal life.

• A hawk sits atop a tree in a forest, meditating his place in creation. He sees himself as the pinnacle of the universe, around whom everything revolves.

• He is a deadly killing machine, born to kill, born to rule the world.

• Or is this man we are talking about?

http://knowledge4africa.com/english/index.html

Hawk RoostingI sit in the top of the wood, my eyes

closed.Inaction, no falsifying dreamBetween 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 rayAre 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 CreationTo 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 directThrough 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.

Structure

• irregular lines: long and short

• cacophony: words combining consonant sounds that don’t permit an easy flow of pronunciation, but rather produce sharpness or harshness

• pauses within the lines

The Hawk…

• Perched on the top of the trees.

• Inspects the land below

• has some arrogant ideas of himself

• thinking that he holds Creation in his feet

• all is there for him to kill and eat

• he is going to keep things like this for ever

New Words• inaction: without any

action, in a static state • falsifying: make false

so as to mislead, represent falsely

• hooked: bent like a hook

• rehearse: practise speech, performance

• buoyancy: power to float in a liquid

 http://jpkc.hfut.edu.cn/2007/upload_files/1221901758.ppt

New Words continued

• creation: bringing into existence; the world, the universe; things created

• sophistry: false argument; clever, seemingly sensible, but false reasoning

• manners: way of behaving as to other people

• allotment: passing on or giving out portions

• No arguments assert my right: stress, state or declare strongly positively

Image/Character of the Hawk • proud, vain , dominant, arrogant, self-centred,

egotistic • powerful , violent, cruel,

brutal, cold-blooded, blood-thirsty

• The hawk lives according to the rules of its own morality

• Hawk is sufficient unto itself • and at one with its

environment

Symbolism

• Symbol of humanity, like a dictator

• Symbol of violent force of nature (or nature itself)

• it is not violence, it is force

Questions:

• Does the hawk have a personality, if so what is the bird’s personality?

• Is this just a description of the hawk and his psychology, or does it have symbolic or figurative meanings?

Carol Wolff