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CHAPTER: 4
Vision of the Goddess
Ted Hughes’ Nature poetry advocates a pagan life in complete
harmony with the world of Nature, and hence with the Goddess who is at the
centre of pagan religions. The Goddess, in pagan religions, is believed to
manifest herself primarily through the world of Nature. God in pagan religions
shared a true and faithful relationship with the Goddess, but after the
emergence of Christianity (male-oriented religion), God abandoned the
Goddess. She has long been suppressed due to the reign of patriarchy. All
the dictates of the logos like logic, order and harmony replaced the life of
instinct and blood with which the Goddess was primarily associated. The
dominance of rational and scientific behaviour destroyed man’s spiritual and
truthful relationship with the world of Nature and hence with the Goddess. The
Goddess after a long time of repression makes a violent return through
different channels. The coming back of the Goddess has been announced in
Robert Graves’ poetry which greatly influenced Hughes. Hughes’ poetry
marks the violent resurrection of the Goddess through the forces of life and
death, creation and destruction as exemplified in the predatory and savage
instincts of the animals and other ravaging forces of Nature. She appears as
the mother and the muse affecting one’s creation, fulfillment, and renewal of
life. She also appears as the Goddess of death and destruction. Hence, the
Goddess is associated simultaneously with life and death, pleasure and pain,
creation and destruction. The feminine character emerging in Hughes’ poetry
is, in one way or the other, an image of the Goddess and female sexuality is
an incarnation of the Goddess in a state of fertility and procreation. In primitive
fertility myths, the sexual love of the Goddess for god affects the destruction
and rebirth of god. Hughes deals with this creative-destructive love of the
Goddess in his love poems which include ‘Song,’ ‘Parlour-Piece,’ ‘Secretary,’
‘The Dove Breeder,’ ‘Billet-Doux,’ ‘A Modest Proposal,’ and ‘Incompatibilities.’
Keith Sagar observes that the “destructive/creative ‘love’”1 of poems such as
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‘The Dove Breeder,’ ‘Billet-Doux,’ ‘A Modest Proposal,’ and ‘Incompatibilities’
“. . . is not only the love of man and woman; it is also the relationship between
the poet and his Muse.”2 The female Goddess has been presented as the
poet’s Muse by a large number of poets such as Robert Graves and John
Keats. Douglas Day has named other poets for whom the Goddess was an
inspiration and is presented as their Muse:
Among them are John Skelton, “who wore the Muse-name ‘Calliope’
embroidered on his cassock in silk and gold” (p. 476); John Donne,
whose Songs and Sonets are the record of his love affair with the
woman who served as his Muse; John Clare, who believed in “a
beautiful presence, a woman deity” (p. 477); John Keats, who saw the
White Goddess as his “Belle Dame sans Merci”; and Samuel
Coleridge, “whose description in the Ancient Mariner of the woman
dicing with Death in the phantom ship is as faithful a record of the
White Goddess as exists” (p. 484).3
Most of Hughes’ love poems deal with sexuality and reject the bourgeois’
adherence to a rational and moral code of existence which leads to
suppression of instinctive life and the Goddess. Besides these violent sexual
love poems, Hughes has also written ordinary love poems such as
‘September.’ Poems such as ‘Soliloquy of a Misanthrope,’ ‘Fallgrief’s GirlFriends,’ and ‘The Decay of Vanity’ present a vision of the Goddess by
implication. In these poems, Hughes satirizes modern life criticizing it for its
vanity, pretensions and artificiality which suppress the life-force or one’s
instinctive approach to life with which the Goddess is primarily associated.
In Ted Hughes’ first book, The Hawk in the Rain, there are a number of
poems such as ‘Song,’ ‘Parlour-Piece,’ ‘The Dove Breeder,’ ‘Billet-Doux,’ ‘A
Modest Proposal,’ ‘Incompatibilities,’ ‘Fallgrief’s Girl-Friends,’ ‘The Decay of
Vanity,’ ‘The Conversion of the Reverend Skinner’ and ‘Complaint’ which
mark the emergence of the Goddess through different channels.
‘Song,’ one of the significant poems in The Hawk in the Rain, is a
sincere invocation of the Goddess. It is in keeping with what Robert Graves
states: “. . . a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or
Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the
female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.”4 The Goddess is at
the center of this poem. Each stanza begins with “O Lady” and ends with “O
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my lady.” She is revealed as a source of love and blessings to man when she
is adored by him but when rejected, she turns hostile, bringing death and
destruction to the world. The poem presents the Goddess in relationship with
“the moon,” the “cloud,” the “stars,” “the sea,” “the stone,” “the waves,” “the
wind” and the speaking persona of the poem who represents humanity in
general. Elements of anthropomorphism are evident when the moon, the sea
and the wind “blessed,” “caressed” and “kissed” the Goddess. The Goddess
loves those who respect and adore her. When the moon “blessed” her she
“became soft fire with a cloud’s grace.” She became “a marble of foam” for the
sea which offered her a loving and gentle touch. She produced “music” for the
wind which “kissed” her. The use of negative imagery at the end of each of
the first three stanzas conveys a tone of loss and agony. The Goddess
reciprocates love but she also reciprocates hatred. When the Goddess was
discarded by man in favour of God she turned hostile to the world as revealed
in the last stanza:
O lady, consider when I shall have lost you
The moon’s full hands, scattering waste,
The sea’s hands, dark from the world’s breast,
The world’s decay where the wind’s hands have passed,
And my head, worn out with love, at rest
In my hands, and my hands full of dust,
O my lady.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Song,’ 19)
Sexual love is a recurrent theme in Hughes’ poetry. Love in his poetry
is not a romantic conception but, in the light of Schopenhauerian vision, a
blind force over which man can exercise no control. Love, according to
Schopenhauer, “is rooted in the sexual impulse alone.”5 It is the Goddess who
reclaims the lost bond with mankind through the sexual urge. In Hughes’
Poetry, “female sexuality”6 represents the Goddess as “the Mother of
Creation.”7 Love in the poem ‘Parlour-Piece’ appears as a ravaging force like
the “fire” and the “flood” invading man’s life. The title ‘Parlour-Piece’ refers to
a life full of vanity. Modern man is devoid of vitality, yet love like a “fire,” rages
through him so fiercely that he “dared not / Let it out into strawy small talk.”
Love is also “like a flood” that “a trickle” of it will cause greater destruction in
this world of rational pretensions. Man and woman attain completeness or
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wholeness through an act of sexuality. It is through the sexual drive that the
Goddess controls man keeping him in tune with instinctive life. The poem
uses antithetical imagery, figurative language, and alliteration to present love
as a force which asserts itself violently and vigorously in mankind. “Parlour–
Piece” consists of two stanzas which rhyme abab, cdcd.
The poem ‘Secretary’ is a satire on the woman who ignores or rather
suppresses her life-force, the power of sexuality under the burden of rational
and moral consciousness. This poem is also a satirical comment on Western
society which is so rationally and morally ordered that it leads to the
suppression of the power of woman; hence the poem is significant from a
feminist point of view. The secretary, in this poem, suppresses her sexual
urge under the influence of puritanism:
If I should touch her she would shriek and weeping
Crawl off to nurse the terrible wound: all
Day like a starling under the bellies of bulls
She hurries among men, ducking, peeping
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Secretary,’ 21)
She denies her own sexuality by rejecting the advances of men. This is
presented through the use of symbols and images. Her state is comparable to
“a starling” which spends the whole day “under the bellies of bulls” but is selfconscious and scared. She denies the woman in her. The bull here is a
symbol of male sexuality. She avoids the sexual advances which are
symbolically presented by the “move of a horn” and “the gauntlet of lust.” The
secretary lives a mechanical life “Like a clockwork mouse” which is
programmed by society of which she is a part. The last stanza of the poem
reinforces the idea that she leads a mechanical life and denies her sexuality:
For father and brother, and a delicate supper cooks:
Goes to bed early, shuts out with the light
Her thirty years, and lies with buttocks tight,
Hiding her lovely eyes until day break.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Secretary,’ 21)
The father and the brother in the poem stand for patriarchy which governs her
life. In Hughes’ poetry, the suppression of female sexuality is the suppression
of the Goddess in a state of fertility and procreation. Hence, the puritan
rejection of female sexuality is a denial of life itself.
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Love is presented as a predatory impulse in the poem entitled ‘The
Dove Breeder.’ The poem reveals the aggressive face of the Goddess. The
sexual impulse here is destructive and predatory. In primitive fertility cults,
sexuality and procreation go hand in hand and after fulfilling herself, the
Goddess destroys god as is revealed by his emersion in water or his burial.
God is destined to “be sacrificed and reborn,”8 hence renewal of life is
affirmed. In this poem, the male principle is metaphorically attacked and
overpowered by the Goddess: “Love struck into his life / Like a hawk into a
dovecote.” The hawk is the metaphor for the Goddess and the dove, which is
a gentle and benign creature, stands for man who is left with no choice. A kind
of resentment is revealed when the dove shrieks. Derwent May observes:
“The earlier part of the poem describes, in unrhymed lines hovering between
two and three stresses, how a hawk struck into a dove-cote . . .”9 which
metaphorically present how “love has struck into a man’s life.”10 In the kind of
life the dove breeder lived, sex did not play a major role:
He might well wring his hands
And let his tears drop:
He will win no more prizes
With fantails or pouters,
(After all these years
Through third, up through second places
Till they were all world beaters. . . .)
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Dove Breeder,’ 23)
The words “fantails” and “pouters” suggest the life of vanity or futility that the
dove breeder had been leading before love made an entry in his life. In the
concluding couplet, the dove breeder learns to live with the natural force. He
learns to ride “the morning mist / With a big-eyed hawk on his fist.” The dove
breeder “. . . neither rejects the hawk nor surrenders to it. He trains it. He
canalizes its violence into the controlled, civilized, ritualized activity of
falconry.”11 Hence, Hughes presents the transformation of destructive
energies into creative energies.
‘Billet–Doux’ is another poem which presents the sexual relationship
between man and woman. The title of the poem ‘Billet–Doux’ means a love
letter. Love in human beings is presented as a predatory impulse as in
animals. According to Keith Sagar, “. . . it is also the relationship between the
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poet and his Muse”12 as pointed out earlier. Hughes, therefore, prefers women
with the life-force who exhibit a predatory drive:
When I walk about in my blood and the air
Beside her, sweeten smiles, peep, cough,
Who sees straight through bogeyman,
The crammed cafes, the ten thousand
Books packed end to end, even my gross bulk,
To the fiery star coming for the eye itself,
And while she can grabs of them what she can.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Billet-Doux,’ 24)
Hughes rejects the romantic concept of love and describes it “a spoiled
appetite for some delicacy.” The woman in Hughes poetry is not a traditional
symbol of virginity and chastity but a woman with the life-force. The speaker in
this poem walks with the woman who greedily moves through the “crammed
cafes" to grab the opportunity to fulfill the demand of the Will to procreate.
Here, the poet breaks the conventional taboos. Woman is traditionally
considered to be an inactive and submissive partner in love making. Love is
usually portrayed as a male’s hunt for a female. But in Hughes’ poetry it is a
female’s hunt for a man, i.e., the Goddess’ hunt for God.
The emergence of the Goddess through creative-destructive love is
again exemplified in the poem ‘A Modest Proposal.’ Here the lovers are
presented as two wolves or two rivals. Their intention to possess each other
or to master each other is furious and predatory like that of wolves:
Now neither’s able to sleep—even at a distance
Distracted by the soft competing pulse
Of the other; nor able to hunt—at every step
Looking backwards and sideways, warying to listen
For the other’s slavering rush. Neither can make die
The painful burning of the coal in its heart
Till the other’s body and the whole wood is its own.
Then it might sob contentment toward the moon.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘A Modest Proposal,’ 25)
In the animal world, sexual urges or the Will to procreate are never
compromised. Each of the wolves cannot “make die / The painful burning of
the coal in its heart” until it reaches “a mad final satisfaction.” They appear as
rivals with “red smelting of hatred.” Hughes’ purpose in presenting love as a
creative-destructive force is to highlight the Goddess as divine and demonic
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who bestows love and life as well as death and destruction. Towards the end
of the poem, the creative-destructive energies are presented as tamed by the
human hand: “. . . the two great-eyed greyhounds / That day after day bring
down the towering stag / Leap like one, making delighted sounds.” Hence, the
poem is divided in two sections at the level of thought, though it consists of
three stanzas. The first section is about untamed instinctive life which is
represented by the two wolves. The second section reveals that this
instinctive life which is actively present in the animal world is conspicuously
absent in the world of man.
In ‘Incompatibilities,’ the Goddess’ forcibly brings man and woman
closer to each other. Here, an instinctive relationship between man and
woman is a metaphor for a relationship between god and the Goddess in
primitive fertility cults. In these cults, god humbly surrenders to the Goddess
leading to sexual fulfillment, but after the emergence of male-oriented
religions, Christianity in particular, god’s humble relationship with the Goddess
got suppressed. Sexuality is a sin according to Christian puritan thought. This
rejection of an instinctive life follows the repression of the Goddess in the
unconscious mind of mankind. According to the Freudian notion of the return
of the repressed, the Goddess comes back and forces human beings to
adhere to the instinctive life. The lovers, in this poem, are forced to be united
due to the demand of their flesh. Their forced union is highlighted through
imagery of magnets, furnaces and hammer blows:
Desire’s a vicious separator in spite
Of its twisting women round men:
Cold-chisels two selfs single as it welds hot
Iron of their separates to one.
Old Eden commonplace: something magnets
And furnaces and with fierce
Hammer-blows the one body on the other knits
Till the division disappears.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Incompatibilities,’ 26)
Sexuality unites man and woman. This is presented through the image of
“chisels.” Two “chisels” are united by welding. Likewise, “vicious” sexual
desires of the lovers act as “Hammer-blows” which weld things together “Till
the division disappears." Here, Hughes presents love as a predatory impulse
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through which one tries to master the other:
To possess the other wholly, to penetrate to the very ‘star that lights
the face’ . . . the innermost selfhood and integrity of the other, would
be to extinguish that star. This kind of love is hardly to be
distinguished from hate. Such love released is fire and flood, a hawk
in a dovecote.13
The lovers, in this poem, try to master each other and evade their own
surrender. Consequently the poem has an appropriate title ‘Incompatibilities.’
The rhyme scheme of the poem is abab, cdcd, efef, ghgh, ijij.
The poem, ‘Fallgrief’s Girl-Friends,’ satirically comments on modern
people, particularly modern women, who sacrifice their life-force, their power
of sexuality and fertility for the sake of trivial and futile things. In this modern
age, a life of vanity and pretensions has replaced an instinctive and natural
life. The poem presents an ordinary man Fallgrief who is going around with an
ordinary woman who does not possess any outstanding qualities such as
beauty and brains or “wit and lucky looks” which have become more important
than the life-force and vitality. Terms such as “cat-indolence,” “shrew-mouth,”
“flattery,” “cookery,” and “lipstick” effectively highlight the life of vanity.
Fallgrief understands that this pretentious and artificial life suppresses the lifeforce: “. . . wit and lucky looks / Were a ring disabling this pig-snout, / And a
tin clasp on this diamond.” Fallgrief’s denial of admiration for mannequins
appears to be a result of his belief in instinctive life but in a sudden reversal
we learn from the final lines of the poem that since Fallgrief has found a
mannequin he is now a changed man. Hence his belief in instinctive life was
just skin deep: “The chance changed him: / He has found a woman with such
wit and looks / He can brag of her in every company.”
The poem, ‘The Decay of Vanity,’ highlights the suppression of the
Goddess after the emergence of patriarchy and Hughes’ endeavour to
resurrect her. In this poem, the Queen, an incarnation of the Goddess, is
presented dead after one year of sexual relationship with the King who is here
an incarnation of god. The poem presents a reversal of order according to
primitive fertility myths. In the world of these myths, it was god who used to be
chosen by the Goddess for the purpose of sexual procreation after which he
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was killed. According to Douglas Day, Robert Graves affirms that “In the prehistoric matriarchal societies, . . . a queen who was the temporary incarnation
of the Goddess took to herself periodically a king, who had to be sacrificed
before his strength decayed, to preserve the fertility of the land.”14 In this
poem, the death of the Goddess represents the suppression of the female
principle after the emergence of patriarchy. The king tried for three years to
continue that relationship “but after that / I let your eye shrink and your body
dry” since patriarchy came into existence. The speaking persona of the poem
refers to a man who is trying to resurrect the Goddess. This could be a
description of Ted Hughes himself who is making this effort to resurrect the
Goddess since it is the Goddess who functions as Hughes’ poetic muse as is
revealed in poems such as ‘Song,’ ‘Parlour-Piece,’ ‘The Dove Breeder,’ ‘BilletDoux,’ and ‘A Modest Proposal.’ Hughes’ entire corpus of poetry can be
interpreted as such an attempt. The rhyme scheme of the poem is aba, cdc,
efe, ghg, iji.
In ‘The Conversion of the Reverend Skinner,’ Hughes mocks the
complacent ways of Christianity which disgraced the Goddess. The poem is
written in dialogue form. It is a conversation between a clergyman and a girl.
The situation is presented in such a way that an atmosphere of irony and
satire is created. The girl, here, is an image of the Goddess who has been
disgraced and rejected by male-oriented religions. Consequently, the
Goddess has become amoral and demonic: “Your church has cursed me till I
am black as it: / The devil has my preference forever.” The poet is criticizing
the clergyman, a proud “upstart gentleman” who behaves arrogantly with the
girl from the “gutter.” But, as the poem progresses the clergyman realizes that
he is proud and begins to value and seek a life which is irrational, instinctive
and vital as opposed to the Christian way of life which is rational and puritan:
But he lay there stretched full length in the gutter.
He swore to live on dog-licks for ten years.
“My pride has been the rotten heart of the matter.”
His eyes dwelt with the quick ankles of whores.
To mortify pride he hailed each one:
“This is the ditch to pitch abortions in.”
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Conversion of the Reverend Skinner,’ 32)
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Christianity suppresses the Goddess by rejecting an instinctive life and
associating it with immorality and evil. In this poem, the clergyman now
welcomes “whores” in order to give expression to his sexual urges which he
had once suppressed under the influence of puritanism. Since the myth of the
Goddess was originally associated with “. . . fertility, reproduction, and
renewal of life, everywhere her worship involved ritual prostitution: obligatory
premarital or occasional prostitution of all women, and institutionalized
prostitution within the Temple itself.”15 Hence, Goddess worship denies
religious and moral dogmas which hinder the fulfillment of the sexual urge.
Here, Hughes rejects the puritan attitude which condemns sexuality: “It is a
‘madness’ of the Puritan fear of female sexuality – where female sexuality has
become identified with the infernal.”16 Male-oriented religions, denying the
instinctive life, banish the Goddess from the life of mankind: “As if my own
heart were not bad enough, / But heaven itself must blacken with the rot!”
When the clergyman gets rid of his rational and puritan pretensions, he sees
the moon “Wiping her wound.” The moon here is the symbol of the Goddess.
The clergyman is now a transformed person: “. . . And he rose wild / And
sought and blest only what was defiled.” The rhyme scheme of the poem is
ababcc, dedeff, ghghii.
Another poem ‘Complaint’ with its focus on Mother Mary becoming
aged suggests that Goddess worship or worship of the female principle which
is a very old tradition has been relegated to the background. This is Ted
Hughes’ complaint in a large number of poems as we have seen and is in
keeping with his beliefs as pointed out in his other texts as well, such as
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. The imagery effectively
portrays how the Goddess was forcibly dethroned and replaced by the male
God:
Aged Mother, Mary, even though—when that thing
Leaped hedge in the dark lane (or grabbed your heel
On the attic stair) by smell of man and coarse
Canvas he wore was disguised too well-ill
A scorching and dizzying blue apparition;─
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Complaint,’ 33)
The second book entitled Lupercal also marks the emergence of the
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Goddess in a number of poems such as ‘Everyman’s Odyssey,’ ‘Of Cats,’
‘Witches,’ ‘The Perfect Forms’ and ‘Cleopatra to the Asp.’ The poem
‘Everyman’s Odyssey’ is rooted in the myth of Telemachus, the son of
Ulysses. As the title ‘Everyman’s Odyssey’ suggests, the poem is a reflection
on the universal bond between man and his mother which symbolically refers
to the relationship between man and the Mother Goddess. The Goddess
appears in varied forms as the Mother, the Muse and the Goddess of the
Underworld or Hell. As the Mother and the Muse she affects creation,
fulfillment and life, but as the Goddess of the Underworld she brings death
and destruction. In this poem, a sarcastic tone is used for the “boisterous
princes” due to their “impertinence” to the mother. The “boisterous princes”
come close to the mother with greedy “eyes” because she brings them “such
trinkets, and hoisted the jugglers and the dancers.” The mother in this poem is
an image of the Goddess. The adjective “white,” used for the mother in this
poem, refers to an obvious characteristic of the White Goddess. Graves
describes the whiteness of the White Goddess: “In one sense it is the
pleasant whiteness of pearl-barley, or a woman’s body, or milk, or
unsmutched snow; in another it is the horrifying whiteness of a corpse, or a
spectre, or leprosy.”17 When the Goddess is a harbinger of love and
happiness to man she is presented as pleasant and attractive but she
becomes terrifying when she is rejected and acquires “the horrifying
whiteness of a corpse, or a spectre, or leprosy.”18 She offers immeasurable
favours to man. In this poem, she protects Telemachus from the flattery of
“boisterous princes.” She hosts a feast for them but saves Telemachus from
their incivility. She also invites Telemachus to recognize the vital impulse of
life and to renounce the materialistic attitude: “. . . O Telemachus / Remember
the day you saw the spears on the wall / And their great blades shook light at
you like the sea.” The mother informs Telemachus that “. . . Your father’s
honour / Was a sword in the scabbard of your body you could not draw, /
What patience you had a slow bird quartering the seas.” Since Ulysses has
led a life of impulse he is presented as the ideal. The poem ends with
sarcasm on the princes who sacrifice their life-force for trivial and materialistic
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ends. The force of alliteration highlights the atmosphere of irony and criticism:
I would see one of the beggars that brawl on my porch
Reach hands to the bow hardly to be strung by man—
I would see these gluttons, guests by grace of their numbers,
Flung through the doors with their bellies full of arrows.
(Lupercal: ‘Everyman’s Odyssey,’ 10)
The poem ‘Of Cats’ metaphorically presents the Goddess of life and
death, creation and destruction simultaneously. The cats in this poem are the
metaphor for the Goddess. The cats, which include “Wildest cats, with scruff
cats, queenly cats / (Crowned),” preside over the “burial” and the “crowning” –
the moment of death and festivity, hence they are an image of the Great
Goddess and the Goddess of the Underworld or Hell fused in one. An image
of the “queenly cats” has a strong association with the White Goddess.
Douglas Day writes, “In the pre-historic matriarchal societies, says Graves, a
queen . . . was the temporary incarnation of the Goddess . . .”19 The White
Goddess as the Goddess of sky appears in different forms as “New Moon,
Full Moon, and Waning Moon.”20 The cats metaphorically represented the
Goddess who “. . . sing sweetly / At your ears and in harmony left with right /
Till the moon bemoods: to the new, to the full . . .” The cats of “darkness and
light” present the contradictory faces of the Goddess as creative and
destructive, divine and demonic. They belong to “A world of wild lamps and
wauling.” The word “lamps” refers to the White Goddess who is “also
Blodeuwedd the Owl, lamp-eyed, hooting dismally, with her foul nest in the
hollow of a dead tree.”21
The last part of the poem metaphorically presents how man
suppressed the Goddess under the dark layers of his mind or the
unconscious, but she returns. Though man put the cat “in a sack” and left it to
be sunk “Under the bridge, in the very belly of the black,” but when he came
back home he “Found that cat on the doorstep waiting for him. / So are we all
held in utter mock by the cats.”
The demonic and threatening face of the Goddess emerges in the
poem ‘Witches.’ Like Dylan Thomas, Hughes was interested in the occult and
this interest is revealed here. The witches are an incarnation of the White
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Goddess who can transform herself at will into a “loathsome hag”22 as
affirmed by Robert Graves. When the Goddess is rejected by a rational and
puritan man, as Adonis did in the original myth, she becomes the Goddess of
Hell or the Underworld. The witches of this poem are the manifestations of the
Goddess of Hell. Here, one is also reminded of the witches in Shakespeare’s
play Macbeth. According to Ted Hughes, “. . . the Witches and Lady Macbeth
(in other words, the Female) appear as the Queen of Hell”23 revengefully
practising deceit and deception, aimed against the rational world of Duncan,
Banquo and Macbeth. These men, in one way or the other, are an image of
Adonis in rejecting the Goddess under the influence of rationalism and
puritanism; consequently the Goddess is the cause of their death. This
demonic and amoral face of the Goddess is revealed in Hughes’ poem
through the use of negative images:
Once was every woman the witch
To ride a weed the ragwort road;
Devil to do whatever she would:
Each rosebud, every old bitch.
Did they bargain their bodies or no?
Proprietary the devil that
Went horsing on their every thought
When they scowled the strong and lucky low.
(Lupercal: ‘Witches,’ 48)
Words such as “witch,” “weed,” “ragwort,” “bitch,” “Devil” and the “scowled”
suggest the negative manifestations of the Goddess. The witches are the
“demonic queens of night”24 who keep
Dancing in Ireland nightly, gone
To Norway (the ploughboy bridled),
Nightlong under the blackamoor spraddled,
Back beside their spouse by dawn.
(Lupercal: ‘Witches,’ 48)
According to science it is a nightmare. But, according to Hughes’ poem, the
witches still roam about at night, and men are bewitched and “devilled” by
them in their dreams. The Goddess exists in the dark layers of the mind of
man and keeps coming in different forms. Being repressed, she becomes
threatening and amoral, and appears in the form of witches. The thoughtprovoking ending of the poem, “. . . who’s to know / Where their feet dance
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while their heads sleep?” leaves the reader in a state of bewilderment.
Like Dylan Thomas, Hughes uses Biblical allusions imaginatively in his
poetry. This is exemplified in the poem ‘The Perfect Forms’ which mockingly
presents God’s rational world of the logos with all its vanity and complacency.
It is a doomed world since darkness reigns over it:
Here is Socrates, born under Pisces,
Smiling, complacent as a phallus,
Or Buddha, whose one thought fills immensity:
Visage of Priapus: the undying tail-swinging
Stupidity of the donkey
That carries Christ . . .
(Lupercal: ‘The Perfect Forms,’ 51)
Here, Socrates and Buddha are the products of the phallic or the patriarchal
order of a rational world which God has created. Socrates is attacked for
phallic complacency, and Buddha is mocked for his “one thought” being
measured against “immensity.” The term “phallus” presents psychological
undercurrents in the poem. In the post-modern context, psychology is an
important and valuable tool through which one can understand social
constructs which led to the suppression of pre-civilized matriarchal societies in
which Goddess worship was a dominant factor. In this poem, Ted Hughes
mocks the logos – the male God who is a proponent of rationality, patriarchy,
logic, order and harmony and is in opposition to the Goddess who stands for
chaos, irrationality and instincts. Ted Hughes ironically presents Christ who
took pain in shedding the “darkness” from God’s “Perfect” creation but it
remains unsaved:
. . . How carefully he nurses
This six-day abortion of the Absolute—
No better for the fosterings
Of fish, reptile and tree-leaper throughout
Their ages of Godforsaken darkness—
This monstrous-headed difficult child!
Of such is the kingdom of heaven.
(Lupercal: ‘The Perfect Forms,’ 51)
Here, Hughes makes deft use of the Biblical allusion to the darkness which
initially reigned over creation according to the Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
108
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep.25
God has tried his best to bless the world with light but could not free it from
the darkness. This is because the Goddess revengefully haunt’s God’s
creation with the curse of darkness.
The demonic and venomous face of the Goddess is again revealed in
‘Cleopatra to the Asp.’ In this poem, Hughes uses myths to interpret the fate
of historical figures. Cleopatra, who is the speaking persona of this poem, is
mythically perceived as the Goddess of the Underworld or Hell who, in the
form of a devil or a serpent, influences the death and the destruction of male
figures such as Augustus, Caesar, Pompey, and Antony, because they
represent the phallic world which is responsible for suppressing feminine
power. In the plays of William Shakespeare too “. . . both Cleopatra and Lady
Macbeth have the roles of Queen of Hell.”26 In this poem, Augustus’ rejection
of the sexual love of Cleopatra can be mythically interpreted as God’s
rejection of the Goddess under the influence of rationalism and puritanism.
Cleopatra revengefully destroys Augustus in the same way as Persephone,
the Goddess of the Underworld, kills Adonis in the original myth. Leonard M.
Scigaj opines: “A diabolic Cleopatra, deprived by Augustus of sexual
fulfillment, merges with Nile fertility, and prays to the Asp to remove this
interloper. Though Antony in Rome failed to remove Augustus, the serpent’s
long coils of historical renewal will accomplish the task”27:
. . . May the moon
Ruin him with virginity! Drink me, now, whole
With coiled Egypt’s past; then from my delta
Swim like a fish toward Rome.
(Lupercal: ‘Cleopatra to the Asp,’ 60)
The third book of Ted Hughes entitled Wodwo marks a revengeful
resurrection of the Goddess in poems such as ‘Logos,’ ‘Reveille,’ ‘The Green
Wolf,’ ‘Theology,’ ‘Gog,’ ‘Ballad from a Fairy Tale’ and ‘Full Moon and Little
Frieda.’ Two warring principles emerge in Hughes’ poetry in the form of God
and the Mother Goddess. Hughes’ poetry as well as his prose, especially
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being establish the belief that it
was the Mother Goddess who was in power in the pre-Christian pagan age,
109
but her power was usurped after the emergence of Christianity, which
established the male God and largely suppressed Goddess worship as
immoral. Angered by this, the Goddess makes repeated efforts to disrupt all
the organization and order that God tries to impose on the world. These two
principles are not based on the concept of good and evil in Hughes’ texts.
Rather, it is a game of power. ‘Logos,’ one of Hughes’ significant poems,
depicts the world as a nightmare because the Mother Goddess does not want
that there should be order in the world. Man has been able to survive and
achieve so much despite adverse conditions only because God blessed him
with strength and courage. But, inspite of this God’s creation has turned into a
“nightmare” leaving God in a state of utter helplessness:
Creation convulses in nightmare. And awaking
Suddenly tastes the nightmare moving
Still in its mouth
And spits it kicking out, with a swinish cry which is God’s first cry.
(Wodwo: ‘Logos,’ 155)
God vehemently tries to kick the “nightmare” out “with a swinish cry” which is
presented as “God’s first cry.” The fourth stanza aptly depicts how all the
logocentric assumptions such as logic, order and harmony are destroyed:
Like that cry within the sea,
A mumbling over and over
Of ancient law, the phrasing falling to pieces
Garbled among shell-shards and gravels,
the truths falling to pieces,
(Wodwo: ‘Logos,’ 156)
In this nightmarish world, only the “killers” can survive. God fails to bring order
and harmony in the world because, as the speaking persona claims, inspite of
the fact that “God is a good fellow, but His mother’s against Him.” The Mother
Goddess, an ancient power, is presented as a rival to God who tried to curb
her power as in the case of Tiamat who
. . . was a First Mother, and her children were all gods [ . . . ] Her
offspring, the gods, aspired to usurp her power and control the
universe [ . . . ] The Gods are duly terrorized. They send a succession
of champions against Tiamat, who, one after the other, are paralysed
with fear and overcome by her powers. 28
The Goddess of the Underworld or Hell emerges even more
110
destructive and devouring in the poem ‘Reveille.’ Here the Goddess appears
in the form of a serpent and takes revenge by inflicting sex and death on
mankind. The poem is an acute reflection of the dark vision of violence and
wickedness which exists everywhere disturbing God’s dream place – Eden.
The serpent hangs around God’s creation and corrupts humanity at large:
No, the serpent was not
One of God’s ordinary creatures.
Where did he creep from,
This legless land-swimmer with a purpose?
(Wodwo: ‘Reveille,’ 156)
This serpent is comparable to a nightmare and is a manifestation of the White
Goddess who can “. . . transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass,
weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid, or loathsome hag.”29 It is
also said by Hughes that the Great Goddess, when rejected by God, emerges
as “the Queen of the Underworld in her enraged animal form”30 in order to
take revenge.
This serpent disrupts Adam and Eve’s “Holy” sleep in Eden:
Adam and lovely Eve
Deep in the first dream
Each the everlasting
Holy One of the other
Woke with cries of pain.
Each clutched a throbbing wound –
A sudden, cruel bite.
The serpent’s head, small and still,
Smiled under the lilies.
(Wodwo: ‘Reveille,’ 156)
The sudden awareness of the serpent’s “cruel bite” disturbs Adam and Eve
who were in a state of bliss in the “Holy” company of each other. God’s
dreamland is turned into a nightmare with Adam and Eve waking up with
“cries of pain.” The title of the poem itself suggests that it is a kind of sudden
awakening to the cruel reality of death and sex. “‘Reveille’ is a rude
awakening of Adam and Eve to sexuality and death.”31 Ted Hughes opines
that sexual urges are “the means by which the ‘dark’ Goddess lays claim”32 on
man. She plays the role of a whore who corrupts God’s creation. It is not only
“Eden’s orchards,” but the whole of creation which is poisoned as the serpent
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lays siege to it:
Behind him, his coils
Had crushed all Eden’s orchards.
And out beyond Eden
The black, thickening river of his body
Glittered in giant loops
Around desert mountains and away
Over the ashes of the future.
(Wodwo: ‘Reveille,’ 156)
The Goddess affects the cyclic processes of life, death and rebirth.
This is presented in the poem ‘The Green Wolf.’ Here, the wolf represents
animal savagery and destruction and at the same time growth and fertility as
suggested by the colour green. The title of the poem also reminds one of
“midsummer ceremonies”33 that took place in ancient times. Ann Skea
provides the following details: “During these ceremonies “a man clad all in
green, who bore the title of the Green Wolf, was pursued by his comrades,
and when they caught him they feigned to fling him upon the midsummer
bonfire.””34 The Green Wolf, which represents the cycle of death and rebirth,
is associated with the god of the primitive fertility myths. He was fated to die in
order to be reborn next year bringing fertility to the land. God’s life, death and
rebirth were influenced by the Goddess. This poem’s focus is on the natural
processes of death and rebirth, unmaking and remaking. However, the poem
is also rooted in Hughes’ personal experience. It is a kind of memoir of a
dying neighbour. The dying man is subject to the cycle of death and rebirth,
unmaking and remaking:
My neighbour moves less and less, attempts less.
If his right hand still moves, it is a farewell
Already days posthumous.
But the left hand seems to freeze,
And the left leg with its crude plumbing;
And the left half jaw and left eyelid and the words all the
huge cries
Frozen in his brain his tongue cannot unfreeze –
While somewhere through a dark heaven
The dark bloodclot moves in.
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I watch it approaching but I cannot fear it.
(Wodwo: ‘The Green Wolf,’ 159)
Ann Skea affirms an identification of the dying man in the poem with Percy B,
who was Hughes’ neighbour in Devon. The theme of death and destruction is
effectively communicated by the apt use of imagery. “The hawthorn and the
beanflower have folklore associations with death . . . and are used, in
conjunction, to similarly menacing effect in Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bee Meeting’ . .
.”35 The “deathly perfume” of the hawthorn refers to the White Goddess in her
revengeful form bringing death and destruction to the world. Robert Graves
associates beans with the White Goddess:
The Pythagorean mystics . . . were bound by a strong taboo against
the eating of beans and quoted a verse attributed to Orpheus, to the
effect that to eat beans was to eat one’s parents’ heads. The flower of
the bean is white and it blooms at the same season as the hawthorn.
The bean is the White Goddess’s – hence its connexion with the
Scottish witch cult; in primitive times only her priestesses might either
plant or cook it. The men of Pheneus in Arcadia had a tradition that
the Goddess Demeter, coming there in her wanderings, gave them
permission to plant all grains and pulses except only beans. It seems,
then, that the reason for the Orphic taboo was that the bean grows
spirally up its prop, portending resurrection, and that ghosts contrived
to be reborn as humans by entering into beans . . . and being eaten by
36
woman . . .
The Goddess thus appears in this poem through things that are a part of the
natural world such as “hawthorn,” “beanflower,” “star,” “flower,” and “dew,” as
well as the human body.
Another equally important poem ‘Theology’ marks the Goddess’
reassertion and resurrection through the “dark intestine,” that is, the instinct of
hunger which corrupts the whole of creation. According to the Bible, Satan in
the form of a serpent seduces Adam and Eve to taste the prohibited apple.
But Hughes in his own interpretation of this event asserts that it is the “dark
intestine” which corrupts Adam, Eve and the serpent:
No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that’s simply
Corruption of the facts.
Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam
The serpent ate Eve.
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This is the dark intestine.
(Wodwo: ‘Theology,’ 161)
Schopenhauer’s awareness of this “dark intestine” compels him to see this
world as a mirror of “a blind incessant impulse.”37 He refers to the instinct of
hunger as the Will to Live which is perceptible not only in animals, including
human beings but also in geological and natural phenomena. Applying this
Schopenhauerian philosophy here, it can be said that Adam and Eve were
victimized by this predatory Will to Live. The Goddess, in the form of the
serpent, corrupts the humanity with “the dark intestine.” It generates chaos
and confusion negating order and harmony which God tries to impose on the
world:
The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in ParadiseSmiling to hear
God’s querulous calling.
(Wodwo: ‘Theology,’ 161)
The poem ‘Gog’ presents the war between the male God and the
female Goddess. Since the Goddess has been rejected by the God of the
logos, she emerges as a demonic force or as negative energy in the form of
the devil or the dragon or Gog which revengefully turns God’s creation into a
hostile world of chaos and disorder, death and destruction. God, on the other
hand, tries to save the world from evil by fighting back the dragon or Gog, as
revealed in the Book of Revelation:
AND I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the
bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.
And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil,
and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,
.............. ................................
And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out
of his prison,
And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters
of the earth, Gog and Ma-gog, to gather them together to battle: the
number of whom is as the sand of the sea.38
Gog, who is the speaking persona of this poem, disputes God’s claim of being
“Alpha and Omega” and wakes up from his slumber. Robert Graves writes:
The result of envisaging this god of pure meditation, the Universal
Mind still premised by the most reputable modern philosophers, and
enthroning him above Nature as essential Truth and Goodness was
not an altogether happy one. The new God claimed to be dominant as
114
Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, pure Holiness, pure
Good, pure Logic, able to exist without the aid of woman; but it was
natural to identify him with one of the original rivals of the Theme and
to ally the woman and the other rival permanently against him. The
outcome was philosophical dualism with all the tragi-comic woes
attendant on spiritual dichotomy. If the True God, the God of the
Logos, was pure thought, pure good, whence came evil and error.39
Gog is not the worshipper of “Holiness,” “Good” and “Logic.” He is rather a
worshipper of an instinctive life with which the Goddess is associated. He
belongs to the same world of the “dark intestine” (‘Theology’) which is part of
the instinct of hunger which disturbs the rational world of the logos. He is in
possession of the “skull,” “bones,” and “mouth” with “the skull-rooted teeth”
releasing “jarring” sounds. He is the “Darkness” which engulfs the whole
world. This world of “death” and “darkness” to which Gog belongs is a mirror
of a woman whose identity remains concealed throughout the poem and is
revealed only at the end. “The blood-crossed Knight” or “the Holy Warrior” or
“the seraph” who gallops around the world in the moonlight in order to fight
the source of evil is a reference to the angel, in the Book of Revelation, who
came down “from heaven” with “a great chain in his hand” to fight “the
dragon.” In this poem, the enemy of the knight or the angel is directly
recognized as a woman whose “kiss” is poisonous:
Through slits of iron, his eyes have found the helm of the
enemy, the grail,
The womb-wall of the dream that crouches there, greedier than
a foetus,
Suckling at the root-blood of the origins, the salt-milk drug of
the mothers.
Shield him from the dipped glance, flying in half light, that
tangles the heels,
The grooved kiss that swamps the eyes with darkness.
(Wodwo: ‘Gog,’ 163)
The purpose of the knight is to fight a woman who is inherent in “the rootblood of the origins” and “the salt-milk drug of the mothers.” He indentifies his
enemy as a woman since “Through slits of iron, his eyes have found the helm
of the enemy, the grail,” which is a symbol of female sexuality according to
pagan religious beliefs. The woman here appears as the combined image of
the Mother and the Muse. “The unborn child” beating “the womb-wall” is
115
anxious to come out into the “light” that is the celestial light of the logos. Since
the child wants to break the “womb-wall” and longs to enter the world of the
logos, the Goddess, in the form of a serpent or a dragon, is ready to devour
the child. According to the Book of Revelation, “. . . the dragon stood before
the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon
as it was born.”40 The child or the Knight seeks to “follow his weapons towards
the light” that is the logos – the phallic powers. On the contrary, Coriolanus
who is a mythical figure is persuaded by the Goddess Fortune “to raise the
siege of Rome at the prayers of his mother and the Roman wives,”41
according to Roman Mythology. In other words, he is led to establish/reinstate
the female deity and her power. He, therefore, seeks to
. . . follow the blades right through Rome
And right through the smile
That is the judge’s fury
That is the wailing child
That is the ribboned gift
That is the starved adder
That is the kiss in the dream
That is the nightmare pillow
That is the seal of resemblances
That is illusion
That is illusion
(Wodwo: ‘Gog,’ 163)
The Knight, whose “weapons glitter under the lights of heaven” or under the
influence of the God of the Logos or the phallus, is fighting against “the
fanged grail” or venomous female power. The weapons which the knight uses
against the woman include “the lance-blade” that stands for male sexuality,
according to pagan fertility myths. In these cults/myths, the female and male
principle or the god and the Goddess functioned in harmony with each other,
but in this poem they emerge as two warring ones. In Hughes’ poetic cosmos,
as revealed in this poem, the Goddess, when rejected by God after the
emergence of Christianity, appears in the form of Gog and venomously
disturbs the phallic world of the logos. Though the Knight, who stands for the
logos, tries to kill his enemy but cannot do so since her poisonous “coil is
under his ribs.” In other words, since the Goddess is a vital part of life, she
cannot be denied or killed.
116
‘Ballad from a Fairy Tale’ is a poem of autobiographical importance
which presents the valley where Hughes was born and brought up. It depicts
Calder Valley which runs from Todmorden to Halifax. The autobiographical
element in this poem is evident in the lines which present the house: “Where
my father was born / Where my grandmother died.” Hughes’ presentation of
this valley is dark and gloomy. It is generally assumed that this gloom is
present in Hughes’ poetry because of the First World War. Though it is true
that war and bloodshed lead to a sense of gloom but in the case of Hughes
the world is gloomy also because of the imbalance between the male and the
female principles. Hughes’ poetry depicts how the female principle/the
Goddess has been backgrounded and the male principle/God - the logos has
been foregrounded. This has resulted in an imbalance, which is often a cause
of gloom in the poetry of Ted Hughes. In this poem there is no reference to
war as such but the landscape that is presented is dark and gloomy. This is
linked to the fury of the Goddess who has been rejected by the male-oriented
societies and consequently passes through the valley without blessing it with
love and life. The colour white has been used as a symbol of the Goddess
and it also reminds one of Robert Graves’ the White Goddess. A number of
symbols in the poem such as the moon, the snow, and the swan are all white.
The ambiguous nature of the Goddess is revealed beautifully with the
description of natural phenomena in ambiguous terms: “a glare of snow,”
“Pounding to smoke a lake of silver,” “A swan . . . / Writhing slowly upwards /
It came beating towards me . . . / In a storm of pouring light.” These
descriptions have both negative and positive connotations. The Goddess, in
this poem, also appears in the form of “a white angel” who passes through the
valley. Hughes wonders whether it would “be a blessing” for the valley or not.
But he sees that inspite of this the valley remains dark and unblessed:
Then this enormous beauty
Passed under the rough hilltop
Opposite the house
Where my father was born
Where my grandmother died.
It passed from my sight
And the valley was dark.
(Wodwo: ‘Ballad from a Fairy Tale,’ 172)
117
A vision of an angel also appears in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
The Angel in Blake’s poetry stands for reason and Christianity which he
rejects. He believes that divinity exists within man and it is his inner spiritual
and imaginative faculty. The outward rational, moral and religious faculties
suppress man’s natural powers or energies which inhabit his inner being. The
Angel in Blake is imprisoned by “single vision”42 and therefore sees only the
destructiveness of the natural forces and advocates a life of reason and
rationality as opposed to the “fourfold vision”43 of Blake which man is capable
of achieving:
Single vision is alienated, hubristic selfhood, and the achievement of
twofold, threefold and fourfold vision are therefore stages in the
annihilation of the self. The purpose is to regain Paradise – but it will
not be the same Paradise. The new Paradise will be ‘organised
innocence’ and atonement on the far side of experience and suffering
44
and many inner deaths.
The angel in Blake’s ‘Memorable Fancy’ is finally purged of the single vision
and is transformed into the Devil who refuses to be governed by external
rational and moral forces. Hughes too, in the poem entitled ‘Pibroch,’ presents
the angels as epitomes of divine wisdom and reason that favours the logos
which he rejects as pointed out earlier. But in ‘Ballad from a Fairy Tale,’ the
angel is presented as an image of the female principle/the Goddess and is
therefore associated with irrationality and the female principle. The poetry of
Hughes also exhibits a disregard for established Christianity, and attempts to
present personal experiences of divine truth through shamanic flights because
a shaman is capable of journeying “into the spirit realm, both to obtain
answers and to converse with the divine.”45 ‘Ballad from a Fairy Tale’ presents
the poet’s own account of his personal experience of a vision of the Goddess
in dark and deep atmosphere of the Calder valley. The poem is a ballad and
like other ballads it narrates a story. Though Hughes uses the personal
pronoun ‘I’, it is not to be confused with Hughes’ own identity despite the fact
that the poem is autobiographical to an extent. It is rather a poetic persona
adopted by the poet. The poem reminds one of John Keats’ ballad entitled ‘La
Belle Dame Sans Merci’ in which the female principle is presented in a
negative light by the knight who is the mouth piece of the established
118
patriarchal order and hence presents only the negative face of the Goddess.
Hughes’ poem too presents the Mother Goddess as dark and destructive.
This is so because of Hughes’ belief that the Goddess behaves negatively
since she has been rejected by society that is patriarchal. This seems to be
the argument of the poem that have dealt with this concept so far.
‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ is another poem of autobiographical
importance in which Hughes presents his daughter Frieda in harmony with the
world of Nature and the Goddess. Frieda shares an instinctive and natural
relationship with Nature and with the Goddess because she is not hindered by
a “falsifying dream” (‘Hawk Roosting’) or rational consciousness:
And the poet is aware that his daughter is the hand pointing to that
moment because she is utterly open, without defences, without
distracting consciousness of past and future, to the scene, her fine
web of senses perfectly tuned to it, tense as a spider’s web, brimming
46
as a lifted pail.
The consciousness, from which the child is free, causes pain and suffering to
adults due to their alienation from Nature. Blake in his Songs of Innocence
and Experience reveals that a child lives in a state of innocence which is
destroyed in later life because of rational consciousness. Man, being
imprisoned by rational illusions and pretensions or by the single vision in
Blake, has lost the fresh and innocent vision of the world, “openness to
experience, good faith, capacity for spontaneous authentic living”47 like that of
a child. Blake’s vision of childlike innocence “seems at first sight to have
something in common with what Vaughan, Traherne, and Wordsworth say in
their different ways about the vision of childhood which is lost in later life . . .”48
This is also the main concern of Hughes in his poem ‘Full Moon and Little
Frieda.’ The poem begins with “A cool small evening” and little girl’s
responding to that moment with a sense of harmony and kinship:
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucketAnd you listening.
A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.
Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with
their warm wreaths of breath –
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
119
Balancing unspilled milk.
(Wodwo: ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda,’ 182-3)
The Goddess, who is associated with various aspects of Nature, like the
moon, showers love and blessing on the child and does not strike a terrifying
posture:
‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’
The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.
(Wodwo: ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda,’ 183)
The little girl instinctively responds to the “Moon” which is a manifestation of
the White Goddess. Such an instinctive approach is missing in man because
he feels vulnerable. To the man, “the moon is a fickle murderous goddess . .
.”49 He fears that his blood will be spilled out any moment. The very
consciousness of this vulnerability disturbs the relationship between man and
Nature, and therefore man and the Goddess. The cows too, like the innocent
girl, are in kinship with natural surroundings because they possess “A dark
river of blood,” which here refers to the life-force or what Schopenhauer calls
the Will to Live which can momentarily sustain his survival in the face of death
and destruction. But man, under the burden of consciousness, is in a state of
alienation from his life-force, the world of Nature and the Goddess. The
Goddess makes regular efforts to bring man closer to the world of Nature and
to herself:
What seems to be implied is that a bond has been broken which
blindly, violently, ineluctably is always trying to re-establish itself; man
is part of nature, man and nature belong together; it is man himself
who has severed the bond and brought spiralling violence and
destruction into the world. Nature the great reclaimer will always try to
regain man and perhaps eventually devour him. Only if man himself,
Hughes seems to believe, makes every effort (after all, it is man not
nature who is out of step) to bring human and natural being into a
closer, more directly experienced relationship can be a healing of his
sickness and alienation, of the incompleteness which separation from
50
nature’s otherness entails, take place.
Ted Hughes’ poetry is an attempt to re-establish Goddess worship by
undermining the rationally and morally ordered world of the logos/God, and
by reviving an instinctive and spontaneous life like that of animals. His poetry
120
reveals that the Great Goddess is the source of love and blessings but when
her affection is rejected and repressed by rational man she becomes the
Goddess of the Underworld or Hell and resurrects herself through the violent
world of Nature on one hand and predatory impulses like hunger and sex
over which man has no control on the other. When the Great Goddess is
suppressed, the Goddess of the Underworld is needed to restore the balance
forcefully.
121
References
1.
Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 23.
2.
Ibid., 23.
3.
Day, Douglas. Swifter Than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of Robert
Graves. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1963,
163-64.
4.
Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. New York: Vintage Books, 1959,
12.
5.
Edman, Irwin. ed. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Carlton
House, 1928, 340.
6.
Hughes, Ted. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.
London: Faber & Faber, 1992, 4.
7.
Ibid., 4.
8.
Ibid., 8.
9.
May, Derwent. “Ted Hughes.” The Survival of Poetry: A Contemporary
Survey. ed. Martin Dodsworth. London: Faber, 1970,136.
10. Ibid.,137.
11. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 22.
12. Ibid., 23.
13. Ibid., 21.
14. Day, Douglas. Op. cit., 160-61.
15. Hughes, Ted. Op. cit., 8.
16. Ibid., 15.
17. Graves, Robert. Op. cit., 485.
18. Ibid., 485.
19. Day, Douglas. Op. cit.,160.
20. Ibid.,161.
21. Graves, Robert. Op. cit., 502.
22. Ibid.,12.
122
23. Hughes, Ted. Op. cit., 242.
24. Bedient, Calvin. “On Ted Hughes.” Critical Quarterly. 14. 2
(Summer 1972): 107.
25. The Holy Bible: The Old and New Testaments. USA: The National
Publishing co., 1961, Genesis, 1. 1, 2.
26. Hughes, Ted. Op. cit., 300.
27. Scigaj, Leonard M. “The Ophiolatry of Ted Hughes.” Twentieth Century
Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal. 31. 4 (Winter 1985): 382.
28. Hughes, Ted. Op. cit., 15-16.
29. Graves, Robert. Op. cit., 12.
30. Hughes, Ted. Op. cit., 8.
31. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 73.
32. Hughes, Ted. Op. cit., 12.
33. Skea, Ann. Wolf-Masks: From Hawk to Wolfwatching. Accessed on
November 21, 2008, from http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/Wolves.htm
n. pag.
34. Ibid., n. pag.
35. Gifford, Terry, and Neil Roberts. Ted Hughes: A Critical Study. London:
Faber & Faber, 1981, 92.
36. Graves, Robert. Op. cit., 60-1.
37. Edman, Irwin. ed. Op. cit., 217.
38. The Holy Bible: The Old and New Testaments. Op. cit., Revelation, 20.
1, 2, 7, 8.
39. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 72.
40. The Holy Bible: The Old and New Testaments. Op. cit., Revelation, 12.
4.
41. Aldrington,
Richard,
and
Delano
Ames.
Trans.
The
Larousse
Encyclopedia of Mythology. London: Chancellor Press, 1997, 213.
123
42. Sagar, Keith. “Fourfold vision in Hughes.” The Achievement of Ted
Hughes. ed. Keith Sagar. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1983, 291.
43. Ibid., 286.
44. Ibid., 286.
45. Sweeting, Michael. “Hughes and Shamanism.” The Achievement of Ted
Hughes. ed. Keith Sagar. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1983, 78.
46. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 100.
47. Sagar, Keith. “Fourfold vision in Hughes.” The Achievement of Ted
Hughes. ed. Keith Sagar.
Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1983, 285.
48. Bowra, Maurice. The Romantic imagination.
New York: Oxford
University Press, 1961, 30.
49. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 100.
50. Underhill, Hugh. The Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 276.