24 Ted Hughes

Dr. Anjana Sankar

1.    Life & Influences

Childhood and early influences

Edward James Hughes, known as Ted Hughes, was born on the 17th of August 1930 in the little town of Mytholmroyd, in West Riding region of Yorkshire in England. Hughes’s father William Hughes, a carpenter and later a shopkeeper, had served in the First World War.

Hughes’s poetry is full of images of the bleak moors and skies of Yorkshire, and its wind, rain, and shiny hills are images of a pitiless natural world. Besides these, the World War was vivid in Hughes’s imagination as his father, who fought in the Gallipoli peninsula in April 1915 who was one of the seventeen survivors in the battalion which participated in that campaign would narrate to his family, the stories of the fighting in the war which left him seriously wounded. Ted Hughes has prayed homage to his father’s suffering in one of his poems entitled Out.

Education

When Hughes was seven years old, his family shifted to Mexborough, a coal mining town in South Yorkshire. He had his early education in  Mexborough Grammar School, spent two years in the National Service Scheme as a wireless mechanic in the Royal Air force and then entered Pembroke College, Cambridge on a scholarship. There he took up English literature as his chief subject of study, but two years later switched over to archaeology and anthropology. After graduating in 1954, he worked at various job in Cambridge and London. In 1956, he met Sylvia Plath, who was studying at Cambridge on a Fullbright scholarship, and within four months the two poets were married.

1.3. Early Poetic Influences

Among the modern poets, Hughes had previously read Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Lawrence and Auden. He considered Dylan Thomas’s Deaths and End Entrances (1946) a holy book when it was first published. However the poetic influences most evident in his early works were Yeats, Hopkins, and Thomas, Ransom and the other Americans – Shapin, Lowell, Merwin, Wilbur – made it possible to continue his poetic creation.Hughes was also inspired by William Blake and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. By 1956, Hughes was composing poems with a vivid sense of purpose and Plath entered a collection of her lyrics in a contest, the prize of which was publication by Harper. The judges Auden, Spender, and Marianne Moore selected Hughes’s manuscript. The Hawk in the Rain thus came to be published in London and New York in 1957 and received much critical acclaim.

The couple shifted their residence from the U.S to England when Plath was expecting their first child in 1950. Following the birth of a second child, marital discord arose and they were living apart when Plath committed suicide in 1963. Lupercal published earlier in 1960 fulfilled the promise initiated by the earlier first volume but three years following the suicide of Plath, Hughes ceased writing poems and devoted himself to creating children’s literature, radio plays etc. But a trip to Ireland in 1966 revived his creative energy and he published Wodow in 1967. Meanwhile a meeting in 1957 with the American artist Leonard Baskin led to a fruitful collaboration whereby they produced books of poems and paintings illustrating each other. These included Cave Birds(1975, revised 1978) and Moon-Whales (1976). Baskin’s wish for poems to go with his drawings of crows prompted Hughes to start writing the Crow sequence in 1966. In 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, the daughter of a Devon farmer, whom he celebrated in his volume entitled “Moortown.”

1.4 Later Interests

In the year 1970, Hughes joined several other writers to form “the Avron Foundation” to promote and sponsor budding poets, novelists and playwrights. In the summer of 1971, he went to Iran with Peter Brook’s international company to write a play for an Iranian theatrical organization. He published eight major collections in just over two decades apart form writing poetry and prose for children, plays for radio and stage short stories, and some very fine critical essays. A wide variety of forms and intentions mark the full range of Hughes works. This is a fact often overlooked by readers who often, attach the label of ‘animal poet’ or ‘nature poet’ to Hughes, according to P.R.King. Acknowledged as the most outstanding English poet of the age, he was appointed the poet Laureate England following Sir John Betjemen’s death in 1989.

2.    Major Themes in Hughes’s Poetry

Violence

Violence depicted in Hughes’s poems includes not only of savage animals but also in human nature David Perkins in A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After has pointed out that Hughes’s poems “take their initiative from a concrete subject – an image, character or action – which is developed until the poem stands complete. Usually his poem tells a story or have narrative elements” (454) Hughes has associated the word “violence” with what he himself has termed as vehement activity or with what he also calls energy.

In an interview to a magazine editor Ted Hughes once remarked that any form of vehement activity invokes the bigger energy, the elemental power circuit of the universe. Once the contact has been made, it becomes difficult to control. By refusing the energy, one lives a kind of death but if the energy is accepted it destroys the individual. Hence the only alternative is to accept the energy and find methods of turning it to good, of keeping, it under central through the old method of rituals and the machinery of religion. Poems like The Jaguar,  Esther’s Tomcat, View of a Pig, The Bull Moses, An Otter, Thrushes, Pike and Second glance at a Jaguar depict animal violence. Others like Bayonet charge, Six Young Men and The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar present human violence.

The Animal World

Hughes has been celebrated as the poet of the animal world. His animal poems are marked by his fierce concentration. Hughes himself has argued in Poetry in the Making that the secret of writing poetry successfully is “to imagine what you are writing about see it and live it… Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it’ (quoted in Chris Woodward (Ed) Ninetieth and Twentieth Century Verse p.156).

Hughes puts this into practice in poems like The Thought-Fox where the reader can smell the “sharp hot slink of fox” and in Pike feel the “hooked clamp and fangs” of the fishes’ jaws. Hughes has written of the Thought fox that ‘every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them”. (Poetry in the Making- pp. 20).  Woodward remarks  that few poets have evoked creatures with such sensuous immediacy Hughes is deeply attracted by the struggle for survival which is evident in the animal world Hughes describes creatures who are often predators and the deaths depicted by him are violent. “Those who survived do so by virtue of their single mindedness… What some readers find most unsettling is the extent to which Hughes appears at times to glorify the strength and determination of the survivor to the point where he fails to sympathize with the plight of the defeated” (Woodhead 157).

A marked difference between Hughes’s earlier and the later poems lies in the fact that the later poems, even while presenting an utterly unsentimental view of life, tries to explore the experience of the weak and dying with understanding and compassion. Hence as remarked by Chris Woodhead, the “piercing persistence” of the child’s repeated question focuses attention on the poignancy of the lamb’s still-born death in Ravens while in The Stag, Hughes writes very much from the point of view of the hunted animal.

Primitivism and mythology

Hughes’s frequent use of animals as the subject of his poetry springs from the fact that “he sees in them the most clear manifestation of a life-force that is distinctly non human, or rather, is non-rational in its source of power… since then he has moved on to express a sense of sterility and nihilism in modern man’s response to life, a response which he connects with the dominance of man’s rational, objective intellect at the expense of the life of the emotions and imagination” (King 110).

The Anthology Crow (1980) gives the reader a protagonist – the crow – who is a curious and intriguing blend of ancient myths and legends, apart from the significance endowed upon the bird by Hughes himself. The concept of Crow-Man, was borrowed by Hughes from Leonard Baskins’ drawings and he himself attributed features from Eskimo, Red Indian and Celtic folklore to the creature before launching him into the human world. P.R. King has termed  Crow as Hughes’s own creation myth, a kind of black genesis… a story in the stark and simple style of traditional “creation myths (for instance, the Eskimo legend of the black races and the White Snow). It was to express the idea that even a life of great pain and suffering could still contain an irreducible force for survival… Crow is the spirit of endurance, the basic grit for survival at the bottom of even the worst of experiences” (135).

In form, the Crow poems may have been influenced by the Yugoslav poet, Vasko Popa whose vision “of the struggle of animal cells and of the torment of the spirit in a world reduced to this” attracted Hughes, which he states in his introduction to Popa’s collected poems in 1978 (Perkins 455). Hughes also praises Popa’s shift here from “literary surrealism the far older and deeper thing, the surrealism of the folklore” that functions as “a little fable or visionary anecdote” (Perkins 455)

Crow and the Trickster Mythology

Several critics have related crow poems to the Trickster myths of the North American Indians which present a wandering hero, always hungry and not guided by normal conceptions of good and evil, who is often playing tricks on people or having them played on him. The trickster is often a raven and in both the myths of the Indians and those of Hughes, the events take place at the beginning or end of the cosmos, with no specific place or time. Similar to the myths of the Trickster and many other primitive myths, several of the crow poems explain how a feature of existence originated.

“A Childish Prank” is one such poem where the Crow intervenes in Gods problem of how to bring life to Adam and Eve. The problem in so great that  God sleeps on it, and while he sleeps the Crow, laughing, bites the worm in half and stuffs half into Adam and half into Eve. Ever afterwards, the two are continually trying to come together for the two halves of the worm to join up

He shifted into man the tail half

With the wounded end hanging out.

He stuffed the head half head first into woman

And it crept in deeper and up.

To peer out through her eyes

Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly

Because O it was painful.

“It is a Sardonic View of Sex. This is one of the most successful of the individual poems. It creates speedily and simply  with force and black humour an alternative to the traditional biblical creation story” (King 139).

It has been widely held that Hughes’s Crow is an antagonist Bible, a myth that parallels and denies the Biblical one. These poems are a Satire on the prevailing religious beliefs of the people, especially on the Biblical doctrines regarding the Creation of man, and man’s fall from grace. Taken as a whole, they are a satire on Christianity and the Christian beliefs, anti-Biblical and anti- traditional and show Hughes’s skill in employing irony and Sarcasm. Both highly entertaining and profoundly startling in structure, these poems are highly shocking and debunk all traditional beliefs of religion.

Wodwo and other bird myths

Wodwo (1967) exhibits Hughes’s increased preoccupation with  describing the divided nature of man and his relationship to the non-human powers of the universe. The title poem of the volume is a dramatic monologue expressing the thoughts of a creature, half-man, half-beast. Wodwo is  Wuduwasa in Old English, the early Briton who hide in the woods to escape the Romans in the medieval romance, in Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, ‘Wodwo’ is a wild man of the woods. This creature is on the verse of self- consciousness and seeks knowledge of his identity. Written without punctuation except for interrogatives, the words and ideas run together in a stream of consciousness that suggests the half-rational, confused state of mind of this proto-human creature.

The poem opens with the apocalyptic question “Who am I?” and records the search for an explanation of self, an attempt to discover a pattern of meaning in the universe. Thrust into the universe without a god to guide him,

“I’ve no threads fastening me to anything I can go anywhere I seem to have been given the freedom Of this place what am I then?”

Wodwo is modern man desperate in his desire to know himself. Michael Schmidt remarks “D.H. Lawrence subjects us to violence and pain, “opens” us, in order to be filled and fulfilled. Hughes at times seems to want to open us to  be hurt. In Wodwo literal creatures give way to imaginary ones, nightmare is all about us” (191).Hughes is articulating “modern man’s experience of living in a universe that surrounds him with chaos and which seems to offer no obvious purpose” (King 133).

 Hughes’s interest in Shamanism

Since Hughes’s major poems are preoccupied with the relationship between the human mind and the forces which govern man’s material existence, Hughes shows a deep interest in Shamanism. Anthropologists have used the  term “Shaman” to denote a sorcerer or a with-doctor. He was valued in the older ages for possessing knowledge and direct experience, of “other” worlds which the ordinary man is familiar with only through rituals and myths. Such abilities enabled the Shaman with the ability to cure the sick. The Shaman’s rituals involved singing, dancing and recitation, using a special kind of poetic vocabulary. The modern scientific age affords no scope for faith in Shamanistic rituals yet Hughes’s constant preoccupation with subjects like the unconscious mind, death, the ancient myths and the animal world show his affinity with Shamanism. Many of his poems have been cited by critics as unembarrassed Shamanic flights of fancy onto the spirit world, excursions to the “other side”, where he might properly inhabit the nature of his subject, be it animals, vegetable or mineral, be it Jaguar, snowdrop or rocky crag.

What Hughes shares with a Shaman of the old times is a concern for mental or psychic equilibrium. It is also interesting to note that though Hughes had taken up English literature as his subject of study, he later on changed over to archaeology and anthropology. His poem, ‘Witches’ show his interest in Shaminsm.

War Poems

Hughes had first-hand experience of war as his own father had fought in the World War I and barely survived and Hughes’s poem entitled ‘Out’, is a meditation on his father’s experiences in the war, one of the few autobiographical poems written by the poet. Bill Hughes, Ted Hughes’s father was one of the seventeen survivors in his regiment and was saved on a memorable occasion when a piece of shrapnel, which should have struck his heart, was deflected by a pay-book in his breast-pocket. Ted Hughes who was only four years old had ever since been gripped by war in his imagination The Hawk in the Rain anticipates six poems on war while Wodwo includes Scapegoats and Rabies, Bowled Over (which relates a soldiers desertion in the face of bullet) and Out. The poem Out depicts the four year old Hughes’s absorption of the war at his father’s feet and how it destroyed the Eden of his childhood. The second section of the poem anticipates the birth of a dead man which is the image of a generation of children born for a precise function- to die, and for whom innocence is impossible due to a consciousness of death. The last section of the poem entitled Remembrance Day makes use of the symbol – the flower poppy which serves as a remembrance in honour of the dead soldiers who had laid down their lives in the service of the country.

Hughes does not glorify war or idealize the soldiers taking part in the war. He does not think of war in terms of patriotism or heroism or even victory. War is something abhorrent and horrifying to the poet.

1.    Later Works

His later works include Season Songs (1976), a series of lyrics on the turning seasons, originally written for children, followed by Gaudete (1977), Cave Birds (1978) and Remains of Emlet (1979). Moortown (1979) and River (1983) followed. Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters published in 1998, published a few months before the death of Hughes, is a collection of eighty eight poems which seeks to explore the suicide of his estranged wife, Sylvia Plath in 1963 and their much discussed, politicized and controversial marriage. It is an attempt to address “a loss without self-pity and with as much precision as his memory would allow, answering with unusual quietness and with his eyes averted from those decades of savage and malicious critics and gossips. He is trying to resolve a relationship which was his and hers but has become legendary” (Schmidt 191). This collection published more than thirty years after the Sylvia Plath’s suicide is a poignant recollection of the ill-fated relationship. It was several awards including T.S.Eliot prize and Whitbread Book of the Year prize apart from topping the bestseller list for a long time.

Analysis of the poem ‘Hawk Roosting’

I sit on 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.

This poem, from Lupercal (1960), is a companion piece to the earlier The Hawk in the Rain published in the 1957 anthology of the same title. Here the bird is not described from the outside as in the earlier piece. The readers are straight away plunged into the hawk’s head and its state of mind is imagined and recreated according to P.R. King.

Apart from being a vivid study of the bird, it is a commentary on power mania and the poet masterfully faces the two themes together. Thus  the supposed ruminations of the hawk merge with the thought process of some Fascist dictator like Hitler who is ruthless, arrogant egocentric and megalomaniac. Hence like ‘The Thought-Fox’ this poem too is concerned with its symbolic theme rather than its intended one.

The forceful, arrogant and confident theme of the poem not only emphasizes the strength and power of the bird but also insists on the isolation of the bird and on its brutish strength which leave no room for feelings of compassion.

The hawk prides himself as the apotheosis of power, boasting that it took the whole of creation to produce its foot and each feather. But now he prides that he holds creation in his foot.

Unlike man, the hawk is not assailed by doubts or delicate and weakening scruples which hinder him from accomplishing his will. He boasts that his manners are “tearing off heads / the allotment of death”. The hawk’s monologue, described by David Perkins as “murderous instinct and manic egoism”, evokes a menace arising from the hawk’s assumption of Godlike powers and his utterly amoral, inhuman attitude. Hughes himself has stated that what he “had in mind was that in this hawk Nature is thinking” (Interview with Hughes in London Magazine, January 1971 ‘Ted Hughes and Crow) It is a nature that has nothing to do with morality, compassion or justice. Thus the poem becomes a simple description of the amoral nature and the awful power of non-human life, as contrasted with the limitations of the power of human nature. The hawk is presented as a being vastly superior to man who is unable to accept Nature for what she is and seeks to tame it by giving it philosophical names. The hawk, on the other hand, is not tortured by man’s devitalizing intellectuality or his slavish obedience to rules. Hence the hawk proudly asserts “There is no sophistry in my body / my manners are tearing off heads.”

Reference

• Bold, Allan. Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. Oliver and Boyd, 1976. King, P.R. Nine Contemporary poets London: Methuan, 1979.
• Perkins, David. Modernism and After: A History of Modern Poetry. New Delhi: ABS publishers, 2006.
• Poplaswski, Paul. English Literature in Context. (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
• Sagar, Keith. Ted Hughes. London: Longman, 1972.
• Schmidt, Michael. The Great Modern Poets: The Best Poetry of Our Time Penguin : 2006
• Woodhead, Charles (Ed.) Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Verse An Anthology of Sixteen Poets (Ed) Chris Woohead.