CHAPTER V
LANGUAGE AND STYLE
Ted Hughes is a conscious craftsman and as such
exercises selection and control in the use of
language.
He believes that a poem comes alive through
the employment of appropriate images, rhythms and
words: a poet must "make sure that all those parts
over which you have control, the words and rhythms
and images are alive."1
He further holds that one
should be fully knowledgeable about the "side meanings"
of words and be careful that one of these meanings
does not get "all stuck up" with the "side meanings"
of another word.
2
To avoid such overlap of meanings,
^See Poetry in the M a k i n g , p. 17.
2 Ibid., p. 18.
194
the poet must live the experience he wants to
communicate.
3
One has to "just look at it, smell it,
listen to it, turn yourself into it" and "the words
look after themselves, like magic."
4
This is
demonstrated by his poem ’
The Thought-Fox' in a
significant way.
The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight m o m e n t ’
s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where ray fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by a stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
^Ted Hughes, ibid
4 Ibid.
195
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
The language of the poem captures the mood in
which it was conceived and composed.
the movement of the fox.
It moves with
The rhythm and sound accord
with what is being described.
The poem is a fine
example of poetic empathy: the poet imagines a fox
entering the woods at midnight which is very well
rendered.
The poem has six four-line stanzas.
The first
quatrain is one long sentence which signifies the
coordination between the poet's imagining of
"Something else is alive" and his putting of the
experience in words "on the blank page."
The
prolonged imaginative process is enacted by such
polysyllabic words, taking longer in being pronounced,
as "imagine," "midnight," "moment's," "forest,"
"Something," "Beside" and "Loneliness."
The
crystallisation of the p o e t ’
s imagination into the
196
writing of the poem, and the easy and smooth way in
which it is achieved, are conveyed by the relatively
fast rhythm of the last line of the stanza enacted
by the unstressed monosyllabic words making up the
line.
The movement of the line is reinforced by the
final word "move.11 What impedes the speed of the
first three lines is the preponderance of the consonant
sounds /m/ in "imagine," "midnight," "moment's,"
"Something" and "my"; /d3/ in "imagine" and "page";
/n/ in "imagine," "midnight" and "moment's"; /t/ in
"midnight moment's forest"; /f/ in "forest" and
"fingers."
Compounded with the occurrence of the
vowel /ae/ in "imagine" and "blank," the diphthong
/ai/ in "midnight," "alive" and "Beside" and the long
vowel /o:/ in "moment's" and "loneliness," this
slackens the pace of the first three lines.
The first two stanzas of the poem border on the
eerie; the eerines signalled by the expression
"Something else is alive" is reinforced by these lines:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness.
It is particularly evoked by the words "Something" and
197
"loneliness."
The repetition of "Something"—
signifying vague apprehension, contributes to the
subdued and hushed atmosphere of the two stanzas,
which is intensified by the use of the*allied
expressions "deeper within darkness" and "loneliness."
The wary and nervous approach of the fox
towards "twig, leaf" is brought out with the help of
a word of semantic plasticity, i.e. "delicately."
The word mimes the 'deft' way the fox touches objects
without disturbing the layer of snow on them and
also conveys the brimming nervous energy of the
animal.
The slow, deliberate and prolonged rhythm
of the fourth and fifth stanzas is anticipated and
mimed perfectly by the repetition of the monosyllable
"now" in the stanza immediately preceding.
The
repetition also suggests the continuous process of
"neat prints" being implanted on the snow and points
eventually to the movement of the fox that implants
these "prints" on the snow.
The alliteration of /l/
in "lame" and "lags" and the intrinsic restrained
movement in the two words correspond to the
essentially lagging-behind character of the f o x ’
s
shadow, in fact of anybody's shadow; it follows the
198
animal when the source of light is in front of it,
and thus the alliteration conveys the wary movement
of the fox.
In the fifth stanza the diphthong /ai/ in
"widening" and the long vowel / i :/ both in "deepening"
and "greenness" match the process of dilation of the
fox's pupil in the darkness of the woods, which
condenses "Brilliantly, concentratedly" when the
animal comes "Across clearing."
The continuous but
jerky rhythm of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th stanzas
owes itself to two things: all of them are made up
of just one sentence and the line endings are abrupt.
The resolution of the tension between the poet's
imagination and his fingers' coordination with his
brain, is conveyed by the final rush of the first two
lines of the last stanza:
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
Until now the words had moved with the unpredictable
movement of the fox— sometimes slow, sometimes a
little fast, sometimes hesitant and sometimes
assured.
But the two quoted lines jump into a
hundred meter sprint with the fox's jump into the
199
•‘
dark hole of the head'* where it feels relieved of
all fears.
The poem has aptly been praised for the
magical quality of its language, not only by such
critics as Keith Sagar^ and Richard Webster,^ but
by Ted Hughes himself.
7
It shows Hughes's seriously
and faithfully following his own artistic rules as
laid down in Poetry in the M a k i n g .
Initially meant
for children as Hughes informs us,8 the book interests
ttoth adult readers and literary critics.
It is
interesting to note that Raymond Chapman, the linguist,
ends the first chapter of his Linguistics and
Q
Literature with Hughes's definition of a poem as
reproduced here:
An assembly of living parts moved
by a single spirit. The living parts are
the words, the images, the rhythms. The
spirit is the life which inhabits them
when they all work together. It is
impossible to say which comes first, parts
or spirit.10
^The Art of Ted H u g h e s , p. 19.
6p. 38.
7
Poetry in the M a k i n g , pp. 20-21.
8 I b i d . , pp. 11-13.
^(1973; rpt. London: Edward Arnold, 1983)#
200
Hughes said in the Poet Speaks, no. 5:
I prefer poems to make an effect on being
heard, I don't think that's really a case
of them being simple because for instance
Eliot's poems make tremendous effect when
you hear them, and when I first heard them
they did, and when I was too young to
understand very much about them they had
an enormous effect on me, and this was an
effect quite apart from anything that I'd
call, you know, understanding, or being
able to explain them, or knowing what was
going on. It's just some sort of charge
and charm and series of operations that
it works on you, and I think quite
complicated poetry, such as Eliot's, can
do this on you immediately.il
Hughes exploits langi^e for its physical properties
too with a telling effect in many of his poems.
Some
of the poems in The Hawk in the Rain exemplify this.
For example, language is deftly chosen and handled
to create acoustic effects in the opening quartet of
'The Hawk in the Rain':
I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the
earth's mouth,
Prom clay that clutches my each step to the
ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, . . .
^ Q u o t e d in Ted H u g h e s : A Critical S t u d y , p. 33.
201
The language here is made dense with the repetition
of plosive consonants: /d/ in "drown," "drumming,"
"ploughland," "drag" abd "dogged"; /g/ in "drag"
"dogged" and "grave"; /J)/ in "drumming," "swallowing"
and "ankle"; /k/ in "clay," "clutches" and "ankle."
The articulation of these sounds demands greater
effort and their density matches the belaboured
walking of the protagonist in the poem who has to
force his way through a muddy field in falling rain.
The consonant clusters of /dr/ in "drown," "drumming"
and "drag", of /kl/ in "clay" and "clutches" mime
the pauses in his struggle against mud.
The ligature
/ae / in "ploughland," "drag," "ankle" and "habit" and
the long vowel /i:/ in "Heel after heel" reinforce
the plodding movement of the protagonist, miming his
heaving of each step out of the sucking mud.
But there are poems, such as 'Macaw and little
Miss' and 'Egg-Head' where this kind of language use
does not create the desired effect.
The language
of the first two stanzas of 'Macaw and Little Miss'
alienates the reader with its turgidity tending to
obfuscate meaning:
202
In a cage of wire-ribs
The size of a man's head, the macaw bristles
in a staring
Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of
his eyes.
In the old lady's parlour, where an
aspidistra succumbs
To the musk of faded velvet, he hangs as in
clear flames,
Like a torturer's iron instrucment
preparing
With dense slow shudderings of greens,
yellows, blues,
Crimsoning into the barbs:
Or like the smouldering head that hung
In Killdevil's brass kitchen, in irons, who
had been
Volcano swearing to vomit the world away
in black ash,
And would, one day; or a fugitive aristocrat
From some thunderous mythological
hierarchy caught
By a little boy with a crust and a bent
pin,
Or snare of horsehair set for a song-thrush,
And put in a cage to sing.
One wonders whether these stanzas have any meaning
at all.
The language precludes any such conjecture.
But being read aloud the poem has a different effect
on the hearer: one of mental boxing or mental sparring;
the words concuss one's sensibility.
The clauses—
"suffers the stoking devils of his eyes," "an aspidistra
succumbs / To the musk of faded velvet," "a torturer's
iron instrument preparing / With dense shudderings,"
203
"the smouldering head that hung / In Killdevil's brass
kitchen," do not clearly communicate what they are
meant to.
The words stand out as mere words.
Using
language in this manner, i.e. by sacrificing meaning
to acoustic effects, has its own pitfalls, but at
best it can thus be saved from getting stereotyped
as language does through usage*
Hughes must have
understood the limitations of this type of language
use early enough, because it is not noticeable in
the books after The Hawk in the R a i n .
Hughes generally adapts his language to the
experiences he means to communicate in his poems.
The language of the first section of Wodwo
accommodates the surrealistic, almost nightmarish
experience of the persona.
It is closely modelled
on the language of the title-poem of The’Hawk in the
Rain.
A quintessentially Wodwo poem is 'Ghost Crabs.'
Ghost Crabs
At nightfall, as the sea darkens,
A depth darkness thickens, mustering from
the gulfs and submarine badlands,
To the sea's edge. To begin with
It looks like rocks uncovering, mangling
their pallor.
204
Gradually the labouring of the tide
Falls back from its productions,
Its power slips back from glistening nacelles,
and they are crabso
Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring
inland
Like a packed trench of helmets.
Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.
They emerge
An invisible disgorging of the sea's cold
Over the man who strolls along the sands.
They spill inland, into the smoking purple
Of our woods and towns— a bristling surge
Of tall and staggering spectres
Gliding like shocks through water.
Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.
Their hungers are homing elsewhere.
We cannot see them or turn our minds from
them.
Their bubbling mouths, their eyes
In a slow mineral fury
Press through our nothingness where we sprawl
on our beds,
Or sit in our rooms. Our dreams are ruffled
maybe.
Or we jerk awake to the world of our
possessions
With a gasp, in a sweat burst, brains
jamming blind
Into the bulb-light. Sometimes, for minutes,
a sliding
Staring
Thickness of silence
Presses between us. These crabs own this
world.
All night, around us or through us,
They stalk each other, they fasten on each
other,
They mount each other, they tear each other
to pieces,
They utterly exhaust each other.
They are the powers of this world.
We are their bacteria,
Dying their lives and living their deaths.
At dawn, they sidle back under the s e a ’
s
edge.
205
They are the turmoil of history, the
convulsion
In the roots of blood', in the cycles of
concurrence.
To them, our cluttered countries are empty
battleground.
All day they recuperate under the sea.
Their singing is like a thin sea-wind
flexing in the rocks of a headland,
Where only crabs listen.
They are G o d ’
s only toys.
As the poem begins, the sea is depicted as engulfed
by darkness at nightfall— an image which immediately
arrests our attention.
The spreading of darkness is
shown as taking place under the surface of the sea
and not above it, as is generally the case.
Then the
image of "ghost crabs" popping out of their holes at
the ebb of the tide as "rocks uncovering, mangling
their pallor" is introduced.
While the tide flows
back the crabs emerge like "glistening nacelles."
The image of "nacelles"-^-the covering of the engines
of aircraft, is concrete.
The abruptness of the line—
"Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs" heightens the abstract
quality of "Ghosts," which serves to evoke a sense
of horror of the intangible, reinforced by the
following lines:
206
They emerge
An invisible disgorging of the sea's cold
Over the man who strolls along the sands.
The word "invisible" holds the key to the abstract
surrealistic symbolism
here, highlighting the
helplessness of the persona who admits with horror:
"We cannot see them or turn our minds from them."
The abstract quality of the imagery contributes
to the horror effect.
The supernatural character
of the "ghost-crabs" is best suggested by their being
depicted as "Gliding like shocks through water."
The phrase presents an image which strikingly
combines the concrete and the abstract.
The easy and
smooth movement of the "ghost-crabs" is conveyed
through two appropriate words "Gliding" and "shocks."
"Gliding" is a concrete word, signifying bodily
movement suggestive of gracefulness.
"Shocks," on
the other hand, is an abstract word signifying jerJks
sustained by the body on receiving electric shocks.
Just as a shock cannot be seen but only felt,
similarly "Gliding" of the "ghost-crabs" is only to
be felt and not seen.
This enables the reader to
perceive the real nature of the "ghost-crabs": they
207
do not look corporeal but something abstract.
Their capability to "Press through our
nothingness where we sprawl on our beds, / Or sit in
our rooms" makes man a helpless victim at their mercy.
As they are painted in the pafi^g,, they are a symbolic
representation of man's subliminal thoughts rather
than real crabs.
They are the "turmoil of history,
the convulsion / In the roots of blood, in the cycles
of concurrence."
They also represent man's
unpleasant experiences and thoughts shoved down into
the unconscious where they surface in our sleep.
The
intangible character of the "ghost-crabs" is
suggested by the abstract nouns "Ghost," "spectres"
and "nothingness."
The nightmarish quality of the
persona's experience attains intensity with the use
of appropriate verbs "Gliding," "sprawl," "ruffled,"
"jerk" and "gasp."
These words convey the shocking
nature of the subliminal thoughts and the helplessness
of man during sleep when they invade his consciousness.
Hughes's ability to accommodate language to
the experiences his poems aim to convey, is seen at
•its best in his depiction of the working of an
"agitated, tormented psyche locked in the dark night
208
of the soul"
12 in Wod w o .
It is also appropriate to
his experience of disillusion with the Christian God
and to his interest in the powerfulness of the
sex-impulse.
In ’
Crow's First L e s s o n 1 Hughes
expresses his disappointment with the Christian God
in the most colloquial of idioms.
Crow's First Lesson
God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
'Love,’ said God.
’
Say, Love.'
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into
the sea
And went rolling downwards, discovering its
own depth.
'No, no,' said God, 'Say Love. Now try it.
LOVE.'
Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a
mosquito
Zoomed out and down
To their sundry flesh-pots.
'A final try,' said God.
'Now, LOVE.'
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man's bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling
eyes,
And Crow retched again, before God could
stop him.
And w o m a n ’
s vulva dropped over m a n ’
s neck
and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed,wept—
Crow flew guiltily off.
^ L e o n a r d M. Scigaj, "Oriental mythology in
Wodwo, p. 126.
209
The poem employs both direct and indirect
narration; the latter involves the colloquial element.
The expression— "'Love,1 said God.
'Say Love.'" has
the expediency of a teaching session with a child
of nursery age-group.
On seeing Crow fail to utter
the word "Love," God says: "'No, no' . • . Say Love.
Row try it.
LOVE.'"
use of the phrase
The repetition of "No" and the
"Now try it" remind one of the
language of a nursery teacher.
The capitalization
of "LOVE" serves for emphasis and prolonged
articulation.
When a child fails to pronounce a
word we pronounce it again in order to help it
comprehend the word and articulate it well, with the
least variation.
This we do by first uttering its
alphabets separately and then taking longer than
usual in pronouncing it with due regard to the
appropriate tone for a child to acquire both accuracy
and fluency in speaking the word.
God's effort in teaching Crow to say "love"
does not bear any fruit.
Instead of "love" coming
out of his mouth, "the white shark," "a bluefly, a
tsetse, a mosquito" pop out.
In his "final try"
210
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man's bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling
eyes,
Jabbering protest.
The image of "Man's bodiless prodigious head" coming
out of Crow's mouth is invested with kinetic character
by the phrase "Bulbed out,"
The phrase catches the
popping out movement of "Man's bodiless prodigious
head" from Crow's mouth.
Being bulbular in shape
the head of man is seen as if being blown into a bulb
just as glass-ware is given shape by blowing air
through molten glass.
The phrase "Bulbed out" also
evokes the scene of children blowing bubbles in
chewing-gum.
The head emerges o,ut of Crow's mouth
just as a bubble of chewing-gum comes out of the
mouth of a child.
The sexually determined control of the female
over the male, responsible for the turmoil in
world-history, Helen and Cleopatra being cases in
point, is brought out in two sentences of forceful
description:
And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck
and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
211
The grip of woman's genitals is compared to that of
an iron-clasp.
loosening it.
Even God does not succeed in
The helpless impotence of God is
conveyed through the following line:
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept.
God struggles to separate them and failing curses and
weeps.
The two words "cursed" and "wept" convey
unmistakably the Christian God's helplessness that
results from His abhorrence of sex,
Not only does Hughes use language to voice
his disenchantment with Christianity, but he adapts
it to his systematic journey into the domain of
Hinduism, in such poems as 'The Martyrdom of Bishop
Farrar,'
'An Otter,'
'The Bull Moses,'
'The Bear,'
'Skylarks,' 'The Summoner,' 'A Flayed Crow in the hall
of judgment,'
'Risen,1 'Strangers,'
'River' and the
short story 'Snow'— discussed earlier in Chapter III.
Some of the words / phrases employed in these poems,
appropriately chosen as they are, testify to his
familiarity with the key concepts of Hinduism relating
to karma yoga and dhyan .yoga and their assimilation
into his poetry.
Thus "Gave all he had" in
212
’
The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar' signifies the quality
of a Karma yogi who gives up all his worldly
possessions in the form of desires and expectations.
The "locked black of his powers" in 'The Bull Moses'
refers to the atman as a reservoir of energies.
In
'An O t t e r 1 the "self" or the atman is described as
"Attendant and withdrawn."
This is the language of
the Bhagavad Gita and the phrase signifies the chief
prerequisite for the attainment of yogihood.
In
'The B e a r ’ the language is chiefly metaphorical.
The
central metaphor of the poem, i.e. a bear, appositely
signifies the dormant state of the atman of an
ordinary human being which like the bear comes
instantly into action when prodded into wakefulness.
In 'Snow’ the protagonist endeavours to "fix" his
mind onto something, which approximates to Haughton's
translation of samadhi as "fixed~attentic$"
In
'Skylarks' the words "Earth's centre" and "ballast"
suggest the mundane attachments of the individual,
what|the Hindus understand as mo ha and may a .
the end of the poem the expressions
Weightless
Paid-up
Alert,
Conscience perfect
Towards
213
refer to the qualities associated with yogihood in
Hinduism.
In 'The Summoner' the lines
Before dawn, your soul, sliding back,
Beholds his bronze image, grotesque on the
bed
clearly suggest the capability of a .yogi's
leave its body.
atman to
The protagonist in 'A Played Crow in
the hall of judgment' has resigned himself to his
karmas (as Lord Krishan in the Bhagavad Gita advises
Arjuna to do) as the following lines state:
I shall not fight
Against whatever is allotted to me.
'The Guide' incorporates the Hindu myth of V a y u , the
God of windo
Here Hughes literally translates the
two aspects of Vayu as "flame-wind— a red wind / And
a black wind."
In 'Strangers' we find Hughes
directly borrowing the word "samadhi" from the Hindu
terminology.
Besides, he directly uses the word
"levitating" which signifies the y o g i 's capacity of
floating through air.
The language of 'River* is
conspicuously religious as is shown by the use of such
words and phrases as "fallen from hea v e n , " "water
will go on / Issuing from heaven," "spirit brightness,"
214
"stainless," "delivery of this world" and "god, and
inviolable / Immortal."
Another distinctive feature of H u g h e s ’
s poetic
language is his ability to paint word-pictures.
His
images are astonishingly alive and possess a cinematic
quality as, for example, his poem 'Rain* (M o o r t o w n )
would show.
Rain
Rain. Floods. Frost. And after frost, rain.
Dull roof-drumming. Wraith-rain pulsing
across purple-bare woods
Like light across’heaved water. Sleet in it.
And the poor fields, miserable tents of their
hedges.
Mist-rain off-world. Hills wallowing
In and out of a grey or silvery dissolution.
A farm gleaming,
Then all dull in the near drumming. At
field-corners
Brown water backing and brimming in grass.
Toads hop across rain-hammered roads. Every
mutilated leaf there
Looks like a frog or a rained-out mouse.
Cattle
Wait under blackened backs. We drive post­
holes.
They half fill with water before the post
goes in.
Mud-water spurts as the iron bar slam-burns
The oak stake-head dry. Cows
Tamed on the waste mudded like a rugby field
Stand and watch, come very close for company
In the rain that goes on and on, and gets
colder.
215
They sniff the wire, sniff the tractor, watch.
The hedges
Are straggles of gap. A few haws. Every
half-ton cow
Sinks to the fetlock at every sliding stride.
They are ruining their field and they know it.
They look out sideways from under their
brows which are
Their only shelter. The sunk scrubby wood
Is a pulverised wreck, rain riddles its holes
To the drowned roots. A pheasant looking
black
In his waterproofs, bends at his job in the
stubble.
The mid-afternoon dusk soaks into
The soaked thickets. Nothing protects them.
The fox corpses lie beaten to their bare
b ones,
Skin beaten off, brains and bowels beaten out.
Nothing but their blueprint bones last in
the rain,
Sodden soft. Round their hay racks, calves
Stand in a shine of mud. The gateways
Are deep obstacles of mud. The calves look
up, through plastered forelocks,
Without moving. Nowhere they can go
Is less uncomfortable. The brimming world
And the pouring sky are the only places
For them to be. Fieldfares squeal over,
sodden
Toward the sodden wood, a raven,
Cursing monotonously, goes over fast
And vanishes in rain-mist. Magpies
Shake themselves hopelessly, hop in the
spatter. Misery
Surviving green of ferns and brambles is
tumbled
Like an abandoned scrapyard. The calves
Wait deep beneath their spines. Cows roar
Then hang their noses to the mud.
Snipe go over, invisible, in the dusk,
With their squelching «ries.
The poem opens with a synaesthetic image of
216
rain falling on roofs— "Dull roof drumming*
Wraith-rain pulsing across purple-bare woods."
The
image conveys two sensations simultaneously: the
monotonous sound of the rain falling on roofs and its
transparency.
Rain, no doubt, is tangible but it
could be thought of as abstract in view of its quality
of transparency.
Its colour like that of a "Wraith"
cannot be distinguished.
By juxtaposing the concrete
image of "drumming" and the abstract one of "Wraith"
Hughes produces a composite image with a life-like
quality, which is reinforced by the word "pulsing."
In the rain-sodden landscape
. . . Every mutilated leaf there
Looks like a frog or a ruined-out mouse.
The two images of "mutilated leaf" and "rained-out
mouse" bring out the bleak atmosphere of a rainy day
with striking vividness.
The long and dreary experience of driving
"post-holes" in falling rain is conveyed by the image
of "post-holes" half filling with water "before the
post goes in."
The image of "Mud-water spurt/lng7
as the iron-bar slam-burns / The oak stake-head dry"
217
is remarkable for its evocative quality; it is full
of life, and the reader / listener feels the splash
of "Mud-water" on his face and clothes.
The image
evoked by the phrase "slam-burns / The oat stake-head
dry" has a cinematic quality.
It brings to mind the
momentary drying-up of the "stake-head" by the impact
of the iron bar on the post while it is driven down
the "post-hole."
The image of the corpses of foxes
in their mutilated condition is so life-like that a
feeling of revulsion is induced in the reader.
The
bleakness of the image is very appropriate to the
atmosphere of the poem.
The sequence of twenty-one poems under the
title 'Prometheus On His Crag' in Moortown has been
described by Hughes as a "limbo— a numb poem about
numbness." 13 The language of these poems, however,
testifies to the contrary.
Though "numbness" is the
stated theme in a sense, there is movement in the
sequence as, for example, in Poem 7.
■^Quoted in The Art of Ted H u g h e s , p. 148.
218
Prometheus
Arrested half-way from heaven
And slung between heaven and earth
Swallowed what he had stolen.
Chains hungered. These chains were roots
Reaching from frozen earth.
They sank searching into his flesh
Interrogating the bones.
And the sun, plundered and furious,
Planted its vulture.
So the sun bloomed, as it drank him,
Earth purpled its crocus.
So he flowered
Flowers of a numb bliss, a forlorn freedom—
Groanings of the sun, sighs of the earth—
Gathered by withering men.
Prometheus in this poem is shown as
Arrested half-way from heaven
And slung between heaven and earth.
He is dangling like the Hindu mythical figure of
Trishanku.
heaven.
He swallows the fire "he had stolen" from
His love for mankind is symbolised by the
219
image of "Chains" that sink "searching into his
flesh / Interrogating the bones."
The "Chains" bind
him to the cliff of the mountain, constantly reminding
him of his commitment to human welfare and also
denoting physical punishment.
The image of "roots /
Reaching from frozen earth" to him also suggests his
weddedness to mankind.
The earth is "frozen" because
of the absence of fire that Prometheus has "Swallowed."
The image of "roots" ties up with the image of
"Chains," both signifying Prometheus' firm commitment
to a noble cause.
The movement of the poem is enacted by such
active verbs as "Swallowing," "hungered," "Reaching,"
"sank," "searching," "Interrogating," "planted,"
"drank" and "flowered."
Instead of evoking the state
of "numbness" the language actually evokes Prometheus'
fruitful relationship with humankind and his
courageous defiance of Zeus that enabled him to incur
and brave his wrath.
This is achieved mostly
through the use of highly emotive words, e.g. "Chains"
and "roots" mentioned earlier, suggesting Prometheus'
earth-boundness.
220
Ted Hughes formally announced a shift in«his
poetic style in 1971: '
The first idea of Crow was really
an idea of style. In folktales the prince
going on the adventure comes to the
stable full of beautiful horses and he needs
a horse for the next stage and the king's
daughter advises him to take none of the
beautiful horses that he'll be offered but
to choose the dirty, scabby little foal.
You see, I throw out the eagles and choose
the Crow. The idea was originally just to
write his songs, the songs that a crow
would sing. In other words, songs with no
music whatsoever, in a super-simple and
super-ugly language which would in a way
shed everything except just what he wanted
to say without any other consideration and
that's the basis of the style of the whole
thing. I get near it in a few poems.
There I really begin to get what I was
after.14
Although the style of Crow is a little different from
that of The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal and Wodwo, the
books preceding Crow, it is not altogetherly new for
him.
It is only an improvisation on his concept of
a "utility general-purpose style" (mentioned in
Chapter I).
Hughes's own poetic style could be termed
a "utility general-purpose style," which was born
1 4 iiTed Hughes and Crow," p. 20.
221
with his The Hawk in the R a i n , and adapted to various
themes in his subsequent books.
The clear, precise, colloquial and journalistic
language in the majority of poems in Crow was already
in evidence in such poems as 'Six Young Men,' and 'View
of a P i g . '
The qualifier 'journalistic' signifies
distanced language used in reporting or narrating.
The first three stanzas of 'Six Young Men' give a
factual description of the photograph of the "six young
men" and the fate they c p e to in war.
In stanza I
the poet gives the details of the photograph all based
on facts:
The celluloid of a photograph holds them
well,—
Six young men, familiar to their friends.
Four decades that have faded and ochre-tinged
This photograph have not wrinkled the faces
or the hands.
Though their cocked hats are not now
fashionable,
Their shoes shine. One imparts an intimate
smile,
One chews a grass, one lowers his eyes,
bashful,
One is ridiculous with cocky pride—
Six months after this picture they were all
dead.
The facts offered by the photograph are rounded off
with a characteristically journalistic line: "six montfc
222
after this picture they were all dead.”
Stanza II offers the background account of the
photograph, that when the photograph was taken the
"Six young men" were "trimmed for a Sunday jaunt" to
a place which has a "billberried bank," a "thick tree"
and a "black wall, / Which are there yet and not
changed."
Stanza III is a fine example of factual,
colloquial and journalistic language.
The following
lines vividly describe how the "Six young men" were
killed in action:
This one was shot in an attack and lay
Calling in the wire, then this one, his best
friend,
Went out to bring him in and was shot too;
And this one, the very moment he was warned
From potting at tin-cans in no-man's land,
Fell back dead with his rifle-sights shot
away.
The rest, nobody knows what they came to,
But come to the worst they must have done,
and held it
Closer than their hope; all were killed.
The language is plain and straightforward.
Its
simplicity and factualness could also be seen to mark
the language of the following verses:
The pig lay on a barrow dead.
It weighed, the,y said, as much as three men.
Its eyes closed, pink-white eyelashes.
Its trotters stuck straight out.
('View of a Pig' in Lupercal)
223
That girl
Promised by her looks, is saving up
To buy a maxi-coat.
It will not keep her warm.
She does not want
It to keep her warm. She wants it
To hurry her
Down the lane.
('That girl' in M o o r t o w n )
The bullets pursued their courses
Through clods of stone, earth and skin,
Througn intestines, pocket-books, brains,
hair, teeth
According to Universal laws.
('Crow's Account of the Battle' in Crow)
. . . By the salmon-ladder at the weir—
The sluice cut, the board exit lifted—
The cage drained slowly. A dead cock fish
Sunk on its side, seemed to pincer-lock
The cage wire with its kipe. Already
They were slinging the dead out, rigid in
the net,
Great, lolling lilies of fungus, irreplaceable—
Eggs rotten in them, milt rotten. Nothing
So raggy dead offal as a dead
Salmon in its wedding finery. So
After their freakish luck in the lottery—
Their five thousand to one against survival—
Dead within days of marriage. Three, four,
five.
('The Morning B e f o r e •Christmas' in R i v e r )
These verses from five poems in five major works of
Hugnes read as factual accounts marked by clarity and
precision of language achieved by the use of lexical
items largely referential— "shot," "attack',' and
224
"rifle-sights" in 'Six Young M e n 1; "dead," "weighed,"
"closed," "pink," "white" and "trotters" in 'View of
a Pig'; "That girl," "saving up," "maxi-coat" and
"lane" in 'That girl'; "bullets," "clods," "stone,"
"earth," "skin," "intestines," "pocket-books" and
"brains" in 'Crow's Account of the Battle';
"salmon-ladder," "weir," "sluice," "exit," "cage,"
"dead," "sunk," "slinging," "rigid" and "irreplaceable"
in 'The Morning Before Christmas.'
The first and the fourth passages are
descriptions of facts connected with war, i.e. the
strength of a bullet that knows only its course which
is through the animate as well as inanimate things,
without any preferences.
The second passage gives
us facts about the pig, that it is dead and weighs
"as much as three men" and has closed eyes with "pink
white eyelashes."
The third passage is the factual
account of a girl saving money to buy a "maxi-coat"
in spite of knowing that it will not h e ^ , her in
warding off cold.
The fifth passage gives us facts
aboutthe "weir" that contains salmon,.and .about how
two men search for live salmon in the "cage" and
throw the dead away.
The colloquial element
in these
225
passages owes itself to the repetition of the phrase
"This one" in 'Six Young M e n , 1 tp "they said" in
'View of a Pig,' the repetition of "too" in 'Crow's
Account of the B a t t l e , ' the use of the phrase "hurry
her / Down the lane" in 'That g i r l , ' and the
expression "Already / They were slinging the dead out"
in 'The Morning Before Christmas.'
The language of the first part of Wodwo is
similar to that of the title-poem of The Hawk in the
Rain.
Here the language of 'Ghost Crabs' is similar
to that of 'The Hawk in the Rain': both bear physical
properties which serve to make a special impact on the
reader and the hearer.
The opening lines of 'Ghost Crabs'
demonstrate this amply:
At nightfall, as the sea darkens,
A depth darkness thickens, mustering from
the gulfs and submarine badlands,
To the sea's edge.
The lines abound with plosive consonants.
The
repetition of the consonant /a/ in "darkens," "depth"
and "darkness"; of /Q/ in "depth" and "thickness"; of
/k/ in "darkness," "darkens" and "thickness"; of
/t/ in "nightfall" and "mustering"; and of / b/ in
"submarine" and "badlands" demands effort from the
226
reader in pronouncing the words.
Similar is the case,
for example, with the third stanza of ‘
The Hawk in the
Rain* which is characterized by the repetition of
/$/ in "Thumbs," "throws" and "breath"; of /b/ in
"breath" and "bone"; of /t/ in "tackles," "heart" and
"polestars"; of /h/ in "heart," "head," "hawk" and
"hangs"; and of /d/ in "head," "diamond," "drowner's"
"endurance."
In either case the preponderance of the
sounds indicated contributes to a specific poetic
effect.
-fc
The origin of Crow can be traced back 'L o g o s ,'
'Reveille1 and 'Theology' in Wodwo.
The language of
Crow is closely modelled on that of the poems mentioned
from W o d w o .
The central themes of 'Reveille' and
'Theology' in Wodwo and 'A Childish Prank ' and 'A
Horrible Religious Error' in Crow are identical—
awakening of Adam and Eve to the powerfulness of the
sex impulse.
The p l a i n n e s s s i m p l i c i t y and clarity
of language may be seen in the use of such short and
simple sentences a s "No, the serpent was not / One of
God's ordinary creatures" ('Reveille') and "Man awoke
being dragged across the grass" ('A Childish Prank').
There are thematic and stylistic similarities between
227
the two poems.
The only structural difference
between them is that while Crow is an active
character in 'A Childish P r a n k ’he is not physically
present in ’
Reveille.'
Both the poems have a
mock-serious tone, which is appropriate to them as
parodies of the Genesis.
/
HughesA s statement that the language in Crow
15
is uevoid of music,
could be disputed. Geoffrey N.
Leech writes that "alliteration, assonance, consonance"
contribute to the music in a poem,
1 fi
and this should
serve as a useful criterion to judge whether Hughes's
observation on the language of Crow is appropriate.
We notice sound effects in the majority of poems in
Crow as, for example, in 'A Horrible Religious Error.'
There is alliteration of /b/ in "earth-bowel brown"
and "brows bumped"; of /l/ in "Lifting" and "long";
of /f/ in "final fact" and "flexing on that double
flameflicker tongue"; of /s/ in "A syllable like the
rustling of the spheres."
^See
There is assonance of /3:/
"Ted Hughes and Crow," p. 20.
16A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969;
rpt. London: Longman Group Ltd, 1979), p. 93.
228
in "emerged" and "earth-bowel"; of / i/ in "balancing"
and "mineral."
There is also consonance of /n/ in
"long neck"; of /s/ in "self twisted" and "slackskin."
Mo reader will fail to sense the music in the
following lines:
And flexing on the double flameflicker
tongue
A syllable like the rustling of the spheres.
So, as this analysis has shown, Hughes's statement can
be disputed.
The fact is that the infra-structure
of the style of Hughes*s major works is the same.
What he has achieved in Crow is not a new style but
an improvisation on the style that he introduced in
The Hawk in the R a i n ,
One of the features of Hughes's poetic style
which is unique, is that he begins some of his poems
with the title itself.
For example,
'Her Husband*
in Wodwo is printed in the book as follows:
Her Husband
Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately
To grime the sink and foul towels and let her
Learn with scrubbing brush and scrubbing
board
The stubborn character of money.
229
This stylistic innovation gives Hughes's poetry a
distinct quality for the title does not merely indicate
the subject of the poem, as titles generally do, but
also forms an integral element of the main body of
the poem.
Normally the
title stands apart from the
poem and one's understanding of that particular poem
is not much affected if the title is ignored.
in Hughes this is not thejcase.
The rubric
But
functions
as the initial element of the poem, f/Q^m which it is
not detachable.
If the title of the poem 'Her Husband'
is struck off we get the truncated poem in the following
mutilated shape:
Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately
To grime the sink and foul towels and let her
Learn with scrubbing brush and scrubbing board
The stubborn character of money.
which does not make sense.
Hughes has compared writing of poems with
capturing animals:
The special kind of excitement, the slightly
mesmerized and quite involuntary
concentration with which you make out the
stirrings of a new poem in your mind, then
the outline, the mass and colour and clean
final form of it, the unique living reality
of it in the midst of the general
lifelessness, all that is too lamiliar to
230
mistake. This is hunting and. the poem is
a new species of creature, a new specimen
of the life outside your own.17
Hughes’
s comparing writing of poems with hunting
reminds one of Coleridge’
s theory of imagination where
he describes "The Secondary Imagination" as a "living
power . . .
that dissolves, diffuses,dissipates, in
order to recreate. . . .
It is essentially vital,
even as all objects (as objects) are essentially
fixed and dead."
18
Both believe in the 'theory of
organicism'— that a work of imagination is an organic
whole, a thing full of life.
Hughes contemplates the
subject of his poem in its entirety.
Then his
imagination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates" it "in
order to recreate" it.
The subject absorbs his
whole being till the poem and his mind become one;
'The Thought-Jfox' is a case in point.
In his
imagination the poem moves like an animal and comes
out in the farm of words.
During the process, Hughes
enters into a symbiotic relationship with his subject
^ Poetry in the Making, p. 17.
18
Biographia literarla (1965; rpt„ London:
J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1982), p. 167.
231
of contemplation, participates in its activities,
and creates a "new species of creature, a new
specimen of the life outside" his "own."
In sum, Hughes's mastery over the medium, i.e.
his language is superb.
He invests it with life and
accommodates it to the demands of the variety of his
experience.
In some poems, however, he does betray
laxity in handling language, but tnese are too few
to be taken into account.
His poetic style has
remained consistent and not changed in the essentials,
though he improvises upon and adapts it to the demands
of individual poems and works.